About two months after its initial launch, there’s been thundering silence from the blogosphere / socialstream on WolframAlpha’s computational awesomeness.  And now, even with some buzzworthy stuff, it seems like its wholly underwhelming [not being a stats nut, I will take WebWare's take on VORPs for example].

While WolframAlpha was never meant to in any way replace Google, its got to be a little disappointing to see a 50% drop off in traffic and an almost complete drop off in buzz.

With its growing community, some pretty fantastic stuff with its development in frameworks, astronomy, and other eggheadedness awesomeness, I’m not sure if the problem is a piece of software which is inherently lackluster — Cuil, I’m looking at you.

Maybe buzz isn’t important.  Maybe traffic isn’t important.  But, I suspect that for WolframAlpha’s investors, and as a means to ultimately monetize things, both metrics probably *are*important to some degree.

Here’s hoping that the WolframAlpha team continues to improve its marketing outreach.  Its not that Google needs more competitors, because WolframAlpha really isn’t about Google — its about developing a unique piece of computational answer-ware which deserves to live and thrive in its own right.

So much so, (and moreso than say, “Internet Explorer” ever meant to browsers, or Windows ever meant to PCs) that I wonder how many folks are actually going to give Bing a try.  Notwithstanding the opinions of reputable technology publications like the New York Daily Post, how much of an uphill climb is Bing’s marketing approach going to be when you’re trying to penetrate some fairly hardened assumptions?  And what about Geeks?

Personally some part of it for me is the simple disdain that Microsoft != “cool” (Xbox and its intellectual properties excluded, naturally), and that Microsoft could never really touch the sainted toe lint of Google.  And if that isn’t a touch of Google fanboy-ism I dont’ know what is.

Maybe that’s true.  It probably isn’t.  To that end, I’m going to try and make Bing my default search tool for a couple weeks to try it out.  Who knows?  The last time I tried making anything my default [whatever] I ended up switching out of Firefox right into Chrome.

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.