Well, well Wolfram Alpha just went live last night and we were anxiously waiting for it. However, it wasn’t exactly what we expected. The thrill is gone now. I’m not that excited about it, and I can say that I was very disappointed. I admit that Wolfram|Alpha is in early-development, but I was expecting a whole lot more, and now I’m sure that this wasn’t meant to be the Google Killer. I told you a few days ago that Google Squared will be the Wolfram Alpha Killer, but I was wrong as there is nothing to kill.
Yesterday I told you that I hope Wolfram Alpha’s servers to resist the amount of traffic and stress, but it wasn’t meant to be. Server overload now, many problems, and if you’re lucky enough to catch it while it works, the answers provided are not that enthusiastic. Actually, the first 6 queries that I entered (e.g. what is social media) didn’t work. Well, I finally got to “paris” and it finally returned something to me. Wolfram Alpha assumed that “paris” is a city from France, but it also give me the possibility to choose Paris, Texas or other cities, then it returned me the city population, metro area population, its location, current local time, current weather, approximate elevation, and nearby larger city which was London, UK.
Overall I was disappointed, however, I will give Wolfram Alpha a couple of weeks before making further judgements. We’ll see what happens in the following days when things cool down.
Yes, I was disappointed also. On the rare occasion that I was able to get a result, it was extremely slow. I suppose they will be improving it in the weeks to come. I think they should have waited before going public.
Iris Salmins
Collection Agency for the Media Industry
I have to disagree, I just think you were expecting it to be some special search engine its more of a math engine. But has some cool feature like:
*Try putting your IP address in (or someone elses), it shows you who it is registered to, where it is located, plots it on a map, and an exact grip location as well as information about the city it is located in.
*You can find current positions of the hubble telescope etc in real time and know its trajectory etc
*see where a planet will be
*find out stuff about your birthday etc
Very handy.
Makes fractals, etc.
This will be a usefull tool in the future but for now it is mainly reserved for math and science guys. The creator kept trying to tell everyone it is not a search engine and to stop calling it the google killer.
Google find answers to your search onother webpages and gives you a list. WolframAlpha computes the actually answer.
Still in its infant stages but I think it will get better with time. Its made by mathematicians for other math people. Not kids looking to find myspace.
WTF whos picture was put as my avatar. Ill kill whoever that guy is.