5 Useful Uses for Wolfram Alpha
Whenever a new search tool launches, we techies love to try to break it, find the easter eggs, and argue about whether it's a Google killer. As a usability guy, I love new tools, so I thought I'd put Wolfram Alpha (the new computational search engine by the guys who created Mathematica) to the test and see what it can do that I might actually want to use. Here are 5 truly useful uses for Wolfram Alpha:1. Historical Data
One handy thing about Wolfram Alpha is that you can attach a year to many queries. Let's say you're wondering how past market crashes compare to our current economic situation:
Here are a few more date functions that are useful. Check out historical weather for a location, compare currency values to past values, or check the date of a future holiday:
2. Probabilities & Poker Hands
As a usability guy, I'm also a stats geek, and math is definitely Wolfram Alpha's strong point, but non-geeks can have fun with probability, too. Let's say you want to know what your odds are of getting 37 heads in a row on a coin toss (Hint: very, very low):
Nobody puts any money on coin tosses these days, though, so let's get to the good stuff. Is that poker hand you're holding really as good as you think it is?
Wolfram Alpha will spit back a handy sample poker hand (if you're a total newbie), plus your probabilities on a 5-card or 7-card hand:
3. Nutritional Information
One very useful and well structured feature on Wolfram Alpha is the ability to look up nutritional information. Let's say you want to know just how much fat is going into that guacamole:
You'll get back a mock-up nutritional label, like what you'd find on the back of almost any product in a U.S. grocery store:
Wolfram Alpha is pretty good at combining some types of queries, so why not ask it about that entire sandwich you're about to eat?
4. Colorful Facts
This one is for the web geeks out there. Try typing a hexadecimal color code into Wolfram Alpha, like one of the blues here on User Effect:
Not only will it give you the RGB and HSB conversions, but you'll get suggestions for complementary colors and possible names for the color (based on similar colors):
As a Cubs fan, I'm not really thrilled with my options in that example, but I guess I can't blame that on Wolfram Alpha.
5. Words & Wildcards
Ok, I have to admit that I'm not completely sure about the usefulness of this last one (unless you're a crossword puzzle junkie), but I think it's something to watch. One big gap in Google's engine is the ability to handle character wildcards effectively. Wolfram Alpha lets you use "_" as a wildcard. So, you can enter something like:
...and you'll get the suggestion of either "usability" or "uselessly". I think this is a subtle feature that shows how a computational engine differs from the current generation of search engines, and I expect we'll see more verbal gymnastics from Wolfram Alpha going forward.
Eric
· Tuesday, May 19Interestingly, WA uses google for some things at least. If you look at a city (say, Champaign, IL), and choose the satellite image, it calls up Google Maps.
Dr. Pete
· Tuesday, May 19@Eric - Yeah, I think there are many types of informational queries where they're not even trying to compete, because there's no point. This is an engine that answers some kinds of questions very well (and will probably get better), and others should be left to Google.
Sean
· Tuesday, May 19On The Media did a bit about Wolfram Alpha and the Search guy they were interviewing stressed that this was not a Google-killer this was a Fact Searcher and rewards people with knowledge with more knowledge. From my brief amount of playing around with it, I think it is true. When I search for stuff I know there is statistical info about, I get good results, when I try to compare Warp Speed with Hyperdrives, I get nothing.
Nancy
· Tuesday, May 19What I find interesting about Wolfram Alpha is its binary nature: it either gives you a good answer or doesn't return an answer. You don't have to slog through a bunch of links and snippets of text containing your keywords to try to figure out if there's any useful information for your query. I think of WA as an autistic genius.
David Mihm
· Wednesday, May 20Very cool post, Dr. Pete. WA actually DOES seem to have something that Google doesn't. Google has been trying to do these one-off answer type things for awhile but WA does it better already. Thank goodness they don't just default to Wikipedia.
I like Nancy's line about it being the Rainman of Search Engines. If it can get some branding, I could see it really being a dominant iPhone app for all of my sports bets with friends...for instance, "who was the Duke basketball coach in the mid-1990's when Coach K sat out with heart problems?"
Unfortunately, WA didn't know the answer. Even when I type in just "Duke Coach" it gives me stock quotes for "Duke" and "Coach". Yuck.
Dr. Pete
· Wednesday, May 20@Sean - It's amazing how many posts I read that were basically "WA can't do this thing I do on Google..." - perfectly valid to put it to the test, but you shouldn't hit a nail with a banana and then blame the fruit industry.
@Nancy - They could do a better job about making suggestions when they come up empty, but I agree - sometimes the fact that every Google query returns a million results is overwhelming to the point of uselessness.
@David - I typed in "Ten minutes to Wapner", but got nothing :) I know what you mean about the sports stats - that seems like a perfect fit for Wolfram Alpha, but it's definitely falling short on that front right now. Maybe it's a bit too much of a leap for the math geeks.
James
· Wednesday, May 20Thank you Dr. Meyers, I now see WA in a new light, because when I tried it on the day it was released, I couldn't believe how lame it was. Now I start to understand that I should not expect the same uses as with Google.
Thank you again, and if you have some more useful uses for Wolfram Alpha, I'm all ears!
DiscoStu
· Thursday, May 21My first three searches on WA were:
cosmological constant
hypothesis testing
regression to the mean
It struck out on all three (as in couldn't even make a guess about what I was trying to find) - isn't this the type of stuff WA is supposed to be good for? Maybe I'm still hazy about exactly how it should be used, but if I have to guess what searches are even acceptable it simply isn't that appealing to me. For instance, it returns nutrition value for "2 avocados", but doesn't know what to do with "tuna melt". Right now WA seems to me to return really cool info for *some* queries, but is a complete dead end with others - which to me makes it more of a gimmick than a useful tool....
Dr. Pete
· Thursday, May 21@DiscoStu - I can certainly understand your frustration, but I think part of the problem is that we're all looking at WA as a search engine, and it really isn't. Your sample searches, although all related to math/science, are essentially definitions and not computations. Ultimately, WA is a computational engine - it understands structured questions but not broad queries. Your "tuna melt" search is a perfect example - WA can give you the nutritional content of all of the items in that tuna melt (and you can even combine them into one query), but it doesn't know what a tuna melt is.
I think the frustration is in the learning curve of trying to figure out what questions WA is meant for, and I definitely think they need to do a better job of making that clear and relatively seamless (you shouldn't have to bend over backward to make the engine happy). On the other hand, I don't think it's a gimmick at all - there's a very powerful engine here, and I expect it to evolve into something extremely useful, at least in certain situations.
Sean
· Thursday, May 21There is already a mashup plugin for Firefox that will query Wolfram Alpha each time you do a Google search (via Lifehacker).
It provides a clear comparison/contrast between what the two services do.
jlbraaten
· Monday, June 8I especially like how their logo gives you a progress indicator when queries are processing. It's a simple, yet effective design element.