Much like everyone else, I had a quick peek at WolframAlpha over this past weekend.

My initial impressions?

With its applied use of the Mathematica engine to the Web’s content and user queries, but needing a human element to gather and curate that database, it feels like a cool new tool that needs a lot of work.

My biggest beef is that even the “answers” it spills out to queries are not all that detailed or substantive.  Like others have noticed, it clearly has a niche in its ability to provide answers to questions rooted in the physical, chemical, or engineering sciences.  However, the answers are not detailed and verbose, as you might find in Wikipedia (which, for instance, has a bias towards technical — and geeky — topics), nor does it have a ton of annotated links like Mahalo.  

For example, a query on “Albert Einstein” gives the date of his birth, the date of his death, and the location of both … but that’s it.  With perhaps, the exception of a graph.  

Different, fairly specific queries yield different, specific answers, like for example, the “Price of Gasoline”.  However, even that answer is so specific it might lack any particular usefulness, because its derived from gas futures.  It also presumes that I want to know the price of Gasoline in the United States — which I don’t, because I live in Canada.

WolframAlpha is going to go “Live” on monday, and I have enough understanding *why* WolframAlpha is cool, to want to continue trying it out.  At its barest level, I appreciate that “Math” is trying to sort out the questions in a completely different way than what Google does.

I think the problem, however, is that unless you DO “get” how WolframAlpha works, you won’t really be all that fascinated by it.  This is dually troubled by the fact that average people (and you’re right, I’m making assumptions) are not, on average, as technical as those whose questions will provide particularly meaningful answers.

Now, you’re right — maybe in its “Alpha”, its not really targeted to average folk.  But even so, the lack of substance in many of its answers makes it feel more like a calculator than anything else.  No one with the least iota of tech savvy will mistake it for Google.  Its not that calculators don’t have their time or place (they do), nor that only a tiny sliver of the search engine pie isn’t worth bongo bucks (it is), but that compared to the encyclopedia (like Wikipedia), to me, it doesn’t seem just quite as useful (or meaty enough) for every day queries. 

Like everything else in life, it’ll be interesting to see what the follow up will be, and if / when it will be able to maintain its execution after the hype dies down.