So the all new Wolfram Alpha went officially live yesterday (although it’s been available to play with over the weekend), a website (or more correctly online service) that is aimed primarily at providing direct answers in a structured format rather than a list of documents. Since the football season is now effectively over, I found myself with plenty of time to read other peoples opinions on it and tinker with it myself over the weekend.

As with most things nowadays Wolfram Alpha (referred to as W|A from here on for the sake of my sanity) was launched in what can only be described as a media frenzy, marketing through social channels and ensuring that almost every tech-industry blog is talking about it, even this morning on my Facebook at least 3 people had found something humorous to post about it.

So the word is clearly out, but how good is it?

Things didn’t start well. My first few searches received sorry pages as the servers started to reach their limits, but over the course of Sunday these were few and far between.

I decided to play it safe to begin with and use some of the example searches; 2+2, UK Map, Rochdale.

These all returned lovely structured data informing me that 2+2 = 4 (including Number Name and a visual representation), what the UK looks like and what the population of Rochdale is.

Oh and Apparently I’m 8866 days ago, who’d have guessed.

But it’s not really all that helpful, so I tried to branch my horizons a tad:

• who is the Queen of England? – returned nothing.
• who is the president of the USA? – returned Barack Obama, that was all – but then again that’s all I asked it, but it did provide links to Wikipedia.

So maybe my searches were too human and not certainly American enough, so next up:

• San Diego Chargers – excellent, current season standings and team history statistics.
• Manchester United – not so good, returned nothing.

So W|A seems to be predominately full of American data, for now at least.

So, with my time with W|A drawing to an end I decided to test how good it would be for “people.” For example, my better half is a pharmacist; time for some user testing.

The pharmacy results were better than expected, returning drug information including molecular weight, formula and melting points. It was concluded that this would have been useful whilst at university but in a day-to-day situation this information is already readily available to pharmacists and it provided no information on stability, misuse, side effects and possible conflictions with other drugs, unlike the BNF (www.bnf.org) which is available to all UK pharmacists, or sites found by Google.

It was clear this wasn’t working for me, so I went back a few years and tried to use it as if I was still at School. This had more promising results, I remember spending quite a while looking through books and Encarta many, many years ago trying to find an up-to-date population of Manchester, which W|A happily provided, including what the weather’s like and what it’s been like.

It’s clear that in the “real-world” W|A doesn’t succeed so well, Wikipedia and Google have the casual user pretty much covered and the majority of my searches are ambiguous at best. It’s certainly a good theoretical platform and if I were studying Mathematics or Chemistry at university I could see it being my best friend.

To be honest I’m not that impressed, be it over hyped or possibly that I was expecting far too much, it just didn’t have that wow factor. I’m not giving up though. It is still a work in progress, it is still predominately full of US data, only time will tell if that will change and it does have some fun in it. Asking it:

• How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? – returns “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind (according to Bob Dylan)”
• Meaning of Life – returns 42

It’s not a Google killer, I’m not even sure the two are meant to be compared, and I believe there will always be a place for Google as it has integrated itself into our lives so much now, but wouldn’t it be nice to have at least one alternative. Competition breeds excellence, as they say.