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It seems W|A is something like a computational almanac, and because of that, there's a lot of stuff it doesn't know. It doesn't feel like a search engine to me, and it's not encyclopedic. It had no idea what to do when I asked it about nuclear pebble bed reactors (my favorite test query) but I was kind of impressed when I asked it what the circumference of the head of a 6-month-old female is (which is something i've had to look up when knitting baby hats for friends): http://bit.ly/6tp73 Marijane White, MSLIS [log in to unmask] On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 1:12 AM, Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Sharon Foster writes: > > I wanted to find out how much my house would be worth today in a > > "normal" situation (if there is such a thing in the housing market). > > WolframAlpha helped me to formulate the query > > > > $96900 (1985 dollars) > > > > and then gave me the answer, adjusted for an average inflation of > > about 2.8% per year. > > > > Google gave me a bunch of irrelevant links, which is odd, since Google > > understand all kinds of conversions and other factual queries. Maybe > > it just wasn't phrased correctly, but Google didn't help me to find > > the correct phrasing. > > Funny. I test-drove Wolfram Alpha with a dozen queries off the top of > my head, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them gave "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure > what to do with your input". > > So I was less impressed than you. > > _/|_ > ___________________________________________________________________ > /o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> > http://www.miketaylor.org.uk > )_v__/\ "Have you killed anyone?" / "Yes, but they were all bad" -- > Arnold Schwartzenegger, "True Lies". >