I know this would probably be more suited in a tech-related blog entry but I don’t quite do those anymore, though I might in the future. However, having read a wee bit about the whole whoo-ah regarding WolframAlpha being the new challenger to Google, I couldn’t help but being intrigued so when it finally went live last week I gave it a try.
Having started with their introduction video, my initial reaction was to be rather excited that there would finally be a single location where one could find detailed atmospheric data to build solid arguments when it comes to discussing climate change. Needless to say, I was rather disappointed to find out that their Climatology section was still under development. In other words, when I typed “What was the CO2 level of the atmosphere in 1990″, which it’s meant to understand, I just got a “WolframAlpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”.
Now I don’t want to depict a bad picture of this engine because it is actually quite powerful. If you like graphs, formulas and other factual data about stuff, then it’s a tremendous tool. I’m only really scrapped the surface of it and overall I am rather impressed. For science and math geeks, it’s a treasure grove and I can think of a few people who’d get a kick out of using it. It’s great for things like nutritional information, name popularity trends (well up to a point, it doesn’t understand it if I type my first name in it 
) and other topics.
In fact another topic that greatly interest me that WolframAlpha covers is music. If you type “F# mixolydian” you’ll get some factual information about the mode which is quite useful. However, it doesn’t seem to understand all scales and modes. For instance “F# pentatonic minor” fails. So does “F# melodic minor”. But if you type “myxolidian” instead of “mixolydian” it’ll correct it for you.
You can also find basic information about certain songs. So if you type “Who wrote Iron Man” it’ll pull up the Black Sabbath song with some basic info. However “Who wrote Technical Difficulties” fails to pull up an answer. This might be due to the difference of popularity between Black Sabbath and Racer X (try the latter question in Google and you have the right answer in video 
)
So as I said, overall a nice tool which I hope will have its database expand quite rapidly to cover more topics. And no it’s not going to kill Google, for example it won’t tell me the cinema times in Edinburgh and the weather forecast isn’t very graphic, but it’s nice and complementary. Give it a try below and let me know what you think.
Tags: WolframAlpha
