Re: comments on Wolfram Alpha
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg100335] Re: comments on Wolfram Alpha
- From: "Sjoerd C. de Vries" <sjoerd.c.devries at gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 07:09:00 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <gvtmjt$gjb$1@smc.vnet.net>
Alpha is NOT a search engine. The site makes this clear enough (if you take the effort to read some of its documentation, which is something you apparently haven't done). It has a vast supply of data that it can do calutions with. It's not an encyclopedia of computing algorithms either, not does it claim it is. Google cannot give you the distance to the moon in terms of Sears tower heights. Alpha can. What you could do with Google a week after it launched is significantly less than what you can do with it now, 13 years later. Don't you think that Alpha might have some growth potential as well? Cheers -- Sjoerd On May 31, 12:36 pm, Beliavsky <beliav... at aol.com> wrote: > input: arima > output: Arima,Trinidad and Tobago > Population: > city population | 34997 people > my comment: Nothing about ARIMA time series models, which comes up as > the 3rd link on Google. > > input: garch > output: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input. > * Did you mean:march > my comment: nothing about GARCH time series models, widely used in > finance > > input: united states budget deficit > output: -$347 billion per year (US dollars per year) (2005 estimate) > my comment: Users would want more recent data, such as the 2008 > deficit and the estimated 2009 deficit. > > Wolfram Alpha appears much less useful than the combination of Google > and Mathematica, so I wonder if resources are better spent adding > functionality to Mathematica.