Wolfram Alpha Search - Our Tests and Results

WolframAlpha Search, the computational search that was launched on Friday last week has been the talk of the Net for the past few days. The real question that everyone has, does it have a competitive edge over Google? After we've spent hours throwing everything we got against the new kid on the block, we've come up with our own conclusions and expectations of the search engine.

Wolfram Alpha Weather Search
We did a weather search for Seattle, Washington by typing in "weather Seattle" and we were quickly shown the latest recorded weather information for the city, last updated 59 minutes ago. More interesting was the additional weather history and forecasting that it provided. We were shown graphs with the temperatures both in the past and predicted future temperatures. We can quickly see the cloud cover percentages for the past few days and predicted over the next couple of days. The search result also contains the weather station source and three other comparison stations in the nearby area, in our case within 12 miles.



Based on this search, we were pretty impressed with our results. Another neat weather example would be to search for weather on a specific day in the past such as "weather nyc 02/12/1980" and you are given the weather data obtained for that given day. We did attempt to ask Wolfram for the weather several months into the future and it provided us with "no forecast available". I guess we can't blame it for this but perhaps it should have shown us information based on the "average" weather information for that given day of the month.

Wolfram Alpha Domain Name Search
Our next query involved searching for a domain name to see what type of information we got back so we searched for the obvious, "techfragments.com" and below is what was returned.



It provided us with basic host information such as the location of our web servers (Houston Texas), traffic information which was pulled from Alexa (not very accurate), but it also provided us with some basic webpage information. The web page data contains the page size, how many links are on the page, image count, and how many forms are on the page. Further down the page it shows us an HTML element hierarchy for the page, going into detail of how many paragraphs, tables, table rows, cells, etc are on the page. Why someone would want to know this information is beyond me, by Wolfram gives it to you!

Wolfram Alpha Nutritional Search
Ever wondered how many calories are in a 100 frankfurters hot dogs? Try 14,100. Wolfram actually provides very good nutritional information on just about anything commonly known that we searched for. It automatically provides an "average nutrition fact" sheet for the serving size indicated, in our case 100. We can easily see from the nutrition information that 100 hot dogs contains 1700% of the total fat from a daily value perspective. Based on the output of these results, I'd stay away from the hot dog eating contests!



However, a lot of things that we did search for yielded no results at all, especially when trying to get more detailed information about a specific thing. Also, products are not yet built-in the system so you can't search for say a Mac Book Pro and it know what it is. However, product search apparently is in the works.

Wolfram Alpha vs Google
Do we think WolframAlpha is the next Google? It's hard to tell at this point but it would appear as though Wolfram Alpha is more geared towards obtaining specific information and not "searching the web" like a traditional search engine. I may go to WolframAlpha to find out how long it will take to transfer 21.5GB worth of data over a 6Mbp connection connecting at only 4.5Mbps but I would go to Google to search for web pages with calculators that will do this for me.

We ask that you give WolframAlpha a try to see what you think and make your own opinion of the new computational search engine.

WolframAlpha.com