Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Hamid Ansari on WolframAlpha

With the launch of Wolfram alpha the Internet search industry is surely stirred if not shaken. The pioneering product from Wolfram Research and its flagship product Mathematica has promised a new dimension to the way search is handled in the websphere currently. I had missed to check Google on its Day 1 so I grabed this opportunity to check out WolframAlpha on its first official day! The results were satisfactory if not spectacular. It is built around a niche which was missed by Google; it provides answers to questions that are sometimes better than a chunk of links that you get in the search result set of Google, brisk answers to questions, no skimming through a huge pile of information for a tiny piece of information!
I tried with a few basic questions like "Who is the Prime Minister of India" and got perfect answers. Then I tried a twist, I asked WolframAlpha this question, "Who is the Vice President of India"! Whoa, it got stuck!!!
Either the Wolfram still needs a lot of work or we need to ask our Vice President to work a little bit more!!!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

well, i agree with the closing words :)

but yes, WolframAlpha didn't impress me much. I do tend to ask really weird questions (one of the reasons why my profs tend to close the class-room doors before i can enter); even so, i wasn't too enthralled by it.

it's still WIP, so i guess it'll get better. still, nothing beats brute0force serching. i guess google is here to stay, for a longish time :P

Unknown said...

I recommended Wolfram to quite of lot of people in my company today. The cubicles did have a little buzz but no one was ecstatic. Surprisingly, they said the UI was not all that good (as if google has a better one!). But I guess cuz google is 'Google' now everything about it is better!
Good luck darling baby Wolfram :D

Unknown said...

wolfram is good!!!... i love the details it gives for any function (think mathematics) you type in... i have only tried the ones recommended by the company though, should challenge it with some long ones... but this app for me (and for others doing research, or something like it), is a killer... thanks buddy, didnt know it existed...

Unknown said...

If Niki vouches for something like this it better be good :D

Praveen Dixit said...

Thanks Sir for the information...
Lets give it some time..
Let them do some iterative development and i m sure what google did 10 years ago will be done in very near future and as they say, Every time the History repeats itself..The price goes up

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