Monday, May 18, 2009

WolframAlpha: Another Try!

Today I tried WolframAlpha again (still being excited about the possibilities of the computational search engine). I tried the following searches:

  • One pound of gold: Result OK.
  • Autocorrelation: Resulted in Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input. Interestingly Wolfram MathWorld has a much better result here. (You would think that the knowledge search engine would know about other products in the same family...)
  • Integrate x^n: Result OK.
  • Total derivative x^n: Result OK
  • Legendre Polynomial: Result OK (mostly after clicking on definition link to Wolfram MathWorld)
So far it has not met my expectations for a very smart pure math/physics related content search engine. It might be that the hype was excessive and thus my expectation too high. It might realize its potential some day. For now it just seems like a subset of MathWorld with a dose of real data that Google can (at the very least) get for me much faster.

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