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".
>