But when I tried the service I'd say maybe only 10 or 20 percent of my queries actually worked. He ran through dozens of demos from weather to genetics to calculus to finance, each resulting in beautiful and informative results. When I saw Stephen Wolfram give a demo of the system I was blown away. It's too picky about syntax and not intuitive to get into. And those folks are important, too-just the kind of influential folks people with Web sites like to reach.ĬNET Editor Rafe Needleman: I wouldn't dream of pointing my parents at this. This could unlock a lot of data that students, research assistants, lawyers, marketing managers, financial analysts, and scientists might not have readily available. It'll tell you the box office take of the first "Star Trek" movie, but it won't tell you the theater where you can see the newest "Star Trek" movie.īut a technical audience is still big. It'll tell you the family, genus, species, and caloric value of an apple, and it'll forecast Apple's stock price, but it won't give you apple pie recipes. It's a great exploration tool to find out whether somebody who's 5 feet 5 inches and 160 pounds is overweight, the chemical properties of boron, and whether you're going to get a full moon during the evening of September 4 in Buenos Aires when you want to propose to your fiancee. Here are our impressions of the current version of Wolfram Alpha.ĬNET reporter Stephen Shankland: Today at least, Wolfram Alpha is for the tech crowd-the kind of people who want to dig into the data. It does things with online information that Google does not.
Few have access to the private test version of the service itself, but we got access Monday night. Wolfram Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram on Tuesday gave a demo of the service to a crowd of online reporters. But does Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine," set to debut publicly later this month, live up to its hype as a Web site that Google needs to be afraid of?
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