atabase that doesn’t handle copy/paste well, import the tabbed text file.
According to PC World, the yet-to-be-released Wolfram Alpha Professional will have a direct Excel export feature for a small license fee. Another feature of the Professional edition will be the option to cross-reference your private data with knowledge engine results.
Finding the Easter Eggs (Ah, yes…)
Stephen Wolfram and his team built WolframAlpha with a sly chuckle. There are some whimsical “Easter eggs” (hidden responses in the computational engine’s database) that will put a grin on your face – if you catch the cultural references.
Here’s a fun one. Type What is the meaning of the universe? into the search box:
Any self-respecting geek will recognize this reference to Douglas Adams’ SF novel, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The supercomputer Deep Thought – specially built for the purpose of answering this Ultimate Question – computes and checks its answer for seven and a half million years. And yes, it turns out to be 42.
Unfortunately, The Ultimate Question itself is unknown.
Ben Parr at Mashable has collected 20 of the most popular WolframAlpha Easter eggs. For a good laugh (and, in some cases, a test of your cultural prowess), try these out:
What is your name?
What’s the speed of an unladen swallow?
How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
How to cook a Welshman?
Where am I?
Why did the chicken cross the road?
What’s the answer to life?
P = NP
I can’t let you do that, Dave
(This is WolframAlpha’s response when there’s too much server traffic.)
How long is a piece of string?
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?
What do men/women want?
Where did I put my keys?
Where the hell is Matt?
Are you a PC (or Mac)?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
When is Judgment Day?
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
The API lets you build a mashup, interface with AJAX or Flash, or add application code in almost any programming or scripting language using a web service.
To use the API, you must first request a WolframAlpha API application ID http://www.wolframalpha.com/apiapplication.html
Like any new piece of software, not all users are satisfied with the features and usability of the WolframAlpha product. CNET did a poll of its readers shortly after WolframAlpha was released in May 2009. Asked to judge how happy they were with the outcome of their searches, readers gave Wolfram Alpha an average score of 3.55, with 1 being "most satisfied" and 5 being least.
WolframAlpha is something entirely new – it doesn’t replace Google, but complements it. With subsequent releases, it is likely to become an integral web component.
Based on a small sample of 1,459 responses, the CNET report concludes that, “readers were dissatisfied with Wolfram Alpha’s ability to produce results for anything outside of a relatively narrow set of queries related to math, science, or statistics. Forty percent said they would not recommend Wolfram Alpha to friends, while 28 percent thought it was only appropriate for ‘serious data nerds.’”
It‘s likely that a similar poll – if conducted using a sample of scientists, mathematicians and engineers – would yield significantly different (and much more favorable) results. This isn’t surprising given that parent company Wolfram Research is the developer of Mathematica – heavily used by universities and scientific research facilities. The company has many experts in sophisticated math and science topics, so you’d expect that results for those types of queries produce far more useful answers.
WolframAlpha is something entirely new – it doesn’t replace Google, but complements it. With subsequent releases and a growing database, it is likely to become an integral web component in computational research and analysis.