Taking Wolfram|Alpha on a test run
Just before I left the states, there was tonnes of hype surrounding a new search engine by the named of Wolfram Alpha,in fact some people called it the "Google Killer" a tag that's been given to so many other search engines that have come and gone (remember Cuil?) So when I heard about this new giant killer I shrugged my shoulders with skepticism and reserved my comments/reviews until the time I'd get to give it a test run.
Last week Wolfram Alpha was launched, a video was released a few days earlier which I didn't get to watch because of my bandwidth constraints. I know how videos create an impression but as we all know the proof is in the pudding. Anxious as I was I waited and finally got my chance to run a few queries, my first query "Mozambique Civil War",the result I expected was some information about the duration of the civil war, the main actors (FRELIMO), or some mention of the former president,but boy was I surprised when the result was "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input". A similar search on google brings up a wikipeadia article on the civil war as the top result, as well as a slew of other relevant results.
Disappointed I tried another search "Beer sales worldwide",hoping to find out if the ever famous Tusker was amongst them, but the result was the same. So there I am wondering, did I find this search engine on a bad day?, or may be I'm not putting in the inputs correctly, I then checked out a few sample queries and I seemed to be correct on my inputs. So my queries are correct but the search engine doesn't know how to process them, so does it qualify as a search engine just yet?
I'm not a computer scientist and I won't even pretend to understand how a search engine comes into play, but I'm and end user so my view does count. I see the potential for Wolfram/Alpha, but I don't think its ready for mainstream usage, someone else has described at as a "niche search" http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18225&tag=nl.e539 and I'm inclined to agree until it proves me wrong. All in all, its an awesome technology and can't wait for it to come into full bloom.