Comments on: First Impressions of Wolfram|Alpha

By: abhishekclearforest

abhishekclearforest — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:11:38 +0000

Wolfram Alpha or Alphram would be more innovative if it leveraged the data inside wikipedia along with mathematica besides their knowledge database they have. A killer product would be that which will go and search for the information inside wikipedia automatically and give the resulting sentences.

By: mariana

mariana — Sat, 23 May 2009 09:14:08 +0000

It completely disapointedme the implementation. They had so many ideas that where great and new, supposedlyy also resources to carry them on. But if you go and play with it for a while, you do not see anything neither new, neither more usefull than existing things

By: DrNI@AM

DrNI@AM — Sun, 17 May 2009 09:54:25 +0000

Only the future will tell us how things will end up with Wolfram Alpha, Google & Co, and Wikipedia. I’m inclined to say that W|A will not replace the other two anytime soon. It provides only hard facts, and if you cannot understand these, they are worthless. So if users actually want to learn something, W|A will not make them happy. If they want to lookup up pure facts and maybe related them, it probably will.
Let’s see it this way: It depends on the information need in the users. W|A is good at satisfying only a part of these needs, perhaps a part that Google & Co cannot cope with that well. A mismatch in interpreted information need and provided answer can be annoying. This happens to me every time I enter a product name into Google and get tons of shopping sites instead of a neutral review about the product.