Shankland: Yeah, speaking of Greek mythology, asking Wolfram Alpha questions is like consulting the oracle. It may be improved by the time the system is opened to the public, later this month, but I think that this will be the product's Achilles heel. The system that interprets Wolfram Alpha queries needs a little bit of help. I tried a variety of queries like "test scores san francisco schools" and "population of portland by year" and got, respectively, no result and a pointless result (533,429 person years: what is that?). You have to take stabs at re-typing your query.
Alpha doesn't give you hints as to what's available, nor a good way to drill into data. But from that sort of page you'll probably want to start exploring the data available: Maybe you want to know about population growth, economic information, or weather trends. Type in the name of a city, for example, and it will give you some fun stats on a clean and clear Web page. What the system does know is beautifully presented. Click above for a gallery of screenshots. But when I tried the service I'd say maybe only 10 or 20 percent of my queries actually worked.Ĭurious about how closely NetApp's stock price has correlated with EMC's? Wolfram Alpha will tell you. He ran through dozens of demos from weather to genetics to calculus to finance, each resulting in beautiful and informative results. When I saw Stephen Wolfram give a demo of the system I was blown away. It's too picky about syntax and not intuitive to get into. And those folks are important, too-just the kind of influential folks people with Web sites like to reach.ĬNET Editor Rafe Needleman: I wouldn't dream of pointing my parents at this. This could unlock a lot of data that students, research assistants, lawyers, marketing managers, financial analysts, and scientists might not have readily available. It'll tell you the box office take of the first "Star Trek" movie, but it won't tell you the theater where you can see the newest "Star Trek" movie.īut a technical audience is still big.
It'll tell you the family, genus, species, and caloric value of an apple, and it'll forecast Apple's stock price, but it won't give you apple pie recipes.
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