Wolfram Alpha searching for its niche by Tom Krazit, Webware (May 22)
Computational search engine Wolfram Alpha is disappointing people. In a CNET survey, respondents gave it a low rating (3.55 on a satisfaction scale where 5 was least).
"For the most part, 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." (Percentages based on 1,459 responses.)"
But, as the article points out, WA is not search as we know it with word matches and ranking. It works with data to compute things. But this is only week 1. It needs time to build the databases, and to teach people on how to use it.
Posted by Gwen at May 22, 2009 01:52 PM