Wolfram Alpha Reloads
April 5, 2010
I enjoy firing queries into the Wolfram Alpha system. The challenge for me is figuring out exactly how to get the system to respond. Addled geese are notoriously bad searchers and I get a fair share of “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure hw to compute and answer from your input.” If I can do an input, then Wolfram Alpha can’t do an output. I don’t have that problem when I fire a query into Bing.com or Google.com. Those systems display something, often anything. For most users this approach is exactly what’s needed. In my experience, some people looking for information don’t know what they don’t know. Hence, any information is likely to be relevant in my opinion.
I learned when I read “Wolfram Alpha Tries Again: New Mobile Site, Big Refunds,” that the company is “making a new start” with its mobile search app for the iPhone. The article revealed:
The company has also drastically cut the price of the Wolfram/Alpha App for the iPhone and iPod touch to $1.99, down from the previous rather unfeasible $49.99. It’s offering refunds to anyone that bought at the old price, here – apparently 10,000 people did. It’s a particularly generous move on the company’s part, as it means Wolfram/Alpha is covering the cut Apple took on that price.
Is Wolfram Alpha blazing a trail for the many iPhone application developers who want to cash in on the Apple craze for shiny, touchy gizmos? Publishers of “real” content are among the most interesting segment of app developers. I am looking forward to seeing the results of their software / content initiatives. Refunds would be even more unwelcome than making no app sales in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2010
No one paid us to write this.
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2 Responses to “Wolfram Alpha Reloads”
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[…] Posted in Apple, Search by François Schiettecatte on April 5, 2010 I was happy to see (via Beyond Search) that Wolfram Alpha dropped the cost of their iPhone/iPad app, originally it was one cent short of […]
I have also found “stumping” WolframAlpha surprisingly (to me) easy.
WolframAlpha “does not support Boolean operators.” What that really means is that the Booleans used are not under user control. Any time there is more than one word-like string (WolframAlpha allows searching on mathematical expressions, as well as words), there must be a default Boolean to connect them.
WolframAlpha appears to “decide” what that default Boolean will be on the basis of its “natural language processing” algorithm(s). In my experience with the engine, mostly, it’s OR – that is, you will get “comparison” results from most multiple-string searches.
I suspect that the frequency of WolframAlpha not being sure what to do with your query inputs (and mine) is due to this default. It tries to get a comparison result, and, when such a thing doesn’t make much sense, the engine doesn’t know what to do with your input.