Who'd have thought it - A new search engine!

[Churchill]

Oh YEES

onto podi it goes - Thanks Brian

it's sh!te!

[snaw]

BTW I am a talking heads fan. That is a favourite song and I do not regard it as annoying in anyway.

I like them to, I even like the song - it just has a tendency to circle in my head like Pogle in paris circling the champs eleysees roundabout trying to get off. If you get my drift ...

[BrowneIssue]

Dubbed a 'Google Killer'

Wolfram Alpha

This was advertised on the Chris Evans show earlier today around 5:30 ish.

The Merkin representative said it is coming online within a couple of hours, at 7pm.

So I have had a tab open pointing at them since then. Which says:

"Friday, May 15, beginning at 7pm CST"

That means it is 8 or 10 hours away (or 7 or 9 or 11 or something depending on how they do their summer time).

It's going to be a crock of tulipe, isn't it?

[BrowneIssue]

Just tried www.wolframalpha.com

Hmm. I entered my date of birth and my Firefox 3 on my Windows XP has been at 100% CPU ever since. It has been like that for about 10 minutes. Weird.

So here I am on my reliable Windows ME machine...

A search for "TEDDY BEAR" gives you Teddy McPherson.

Enter my home town and it tells me about it. Fair enough.

Enter today's date and it gives me the weather and sun motions for Leeds (only the other end of the country).

Enter "CUP OF TEA" and get "I'm sorry Dave, I;m afraid I can't do that" which is mildly amusing.

Enter "CUP OF COFFEE" and it goes away to interpret that. And I don;t think it's ever coming back.

Enter "how far is it to the moon?" and it is dead spiffy.

Enter "what is the speed of light in a vacuum?" and it suggests you try "the speed of light in a vacuum" which in turn is spiffy.

"tell me something I don't already know" just points at the film "tell me something"

"siege of vienna" - nothing. That's a shame; it was fairly important.

"battle of hastings" took 3 minutes to come back with the date and the nobs involved.

"battle of waterloo" ditto except it reckons only the French turned up. You'd never know this toy was a Merkin product, would you?

"knob cheese" - that got it thinking. "Socket Error - Connection to Remote Host timed out"

"carbonic acid" (very important stuff) - too slow. I'm dying of old age here.

I have bunged in loads of others where it just says "I don't know what to do with your input".

And my XP laptop is still at 100% CPU.

I reckon it just goes to a room full of monkeys with Google & Wikipedia in front of them.

[BrowneIssue]

I've rebooted & let wolframalpha have another go with my birthdate.

It is interesting watching the page file size go up and down and make a pretty sawtooth graph in Task Manager.

It would be even more interesting if it ever finished whatever it is doing.

[NickFitz]

Asking a reasonably straightforward question, I seldom manage to actually get a response from the server in a reasonable time (i.e. less than 30 seconds).

On the rare occasion that I do get a response, it causes Safari to pop up its "A script is dicking about for too long" warning, which usually means something has got itself into an infinite loop or an infinite recursive descent. Cancelling the script allows it to display the page, saying it doesn't know what to do with my input.

Disabling JavaScript and trying again leads to a page that just says:

To see full output you need to enable Javascript in your browser

Epic fail

[lightng]

Maybe we should point newbies to it when they ask how do they get into contracting.

I tried asking the noob question and got the reply "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

I, on the other hand, have a small idea what they can do with their output.

[OwlHoot]

I've been using the freeby package sage for some symbolic calculations, and this product been coming on in leaps and bounds over the last four years and in many respects is now nipping at Wolfram Research's ankles.

Perhaps that's one reason, along with the current economic climate, why Wolfram have slashed the price of their Mathematica package.

Having forked out the required £200 or so for this (which a year ago would have been about £2000), I only hope it runs a bit faster than their new Alpha thingie does by the sound of it.

[TheRefactornator]

If you can catch it when it's working, try sticking your real name into wolfram alpha - apparently I am equivalent to:

• A small town in Oregon US or a Romanian City
• A flight time of 10hrs 15 minutes or 5657 miles
• 1005 or 11041 people
• An elevation of 4186ft or 417ft

..very disappointing results for me..any tenuous link to Ghengis Khan would be much more satisfying.

[Ardesco]

Tried it and after watching it time out three times in a row I gave up.

Waste of space!