WolframAlpha vs. Google
David Talbot at Technology Review has run the same queries through Google and WolframAlpha. (WA isn’t yet open to the general public, i.e., to you and me.) The queries tend to be of the sort that WA will be better at: comparisons and computations. WA comes out well, but be sure to read David’s writeup of comments on his article.
The overall conclusion is, I think, that it’s going to take a while for WA to train us on the sorts of questions it can answer and how best to ask those questions.
(Some me-centric links: Live blog of Wolfram’s presentation at Harvard. Video of that presentation. My podcast interview with him. My too-early assessment of WA.)
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