So what’s been happening with Wolfram|Alpha this summer? A lot!
At a first glance, the website looks pretty much as it did when it first launched—with the straightforward input field. But inside that simple exterior an incredible amount has happened. Our development organization has been buzzing with activity all summer. In fact, it’s clear from the metrics that the intensity is steadily rising, with things being added at an ever-increasing rate.
Wolfram|Alpha was always planned to be a very long-term project, and paced accordingly. We pushed very hard to get it launched before the summer so that we could spend the “quiet time” of our first summer steadily enhancing it, before more people start using it more intently in the fall.
Two really great things have happened as a result of actually getting Wolfram|Alpha launched. The first is that we’ve discovered that there’s a huge community of people out there who want to help the mission of Wolfram|Alpha. And we’re steadily ramping up our mechanisms for those people to contribute to the project.
The second thing is that we’ve now got actual examples of what people want to do with Wolfram|Alpha—hundreds of millions of them. And it’s terrific to see that so many of them work so nicely. But for us now the most valuable thing is seeing what doesn’t work yet. Because that shows us what we need to add to Wolfram|Alpha.
There are several components. One is knowledge domains. Things people want that Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t yet know. The good news is that there’s been very little that’s come through that wasn’t already somewhere on our to-do lists. They’re long lists. But we can now be confident that they’re good lists.
A second big component is linguistics. Close to half the time that Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t give a result, it’s not because it doesn’t have the necessary knowledge, or can’t do the necessary computation. It’s because it doesn’t understand what’s being asked.
It’s very interesting to see the kinds of queries that come into Wolfram|Alpha, and how they’re phrased. We’re really seeing a new human language. Based on ordinary language, but without a lot of its niceties. Probably closer to the way people think internally.
Wolfram|Alpha is a bit like a child: it’s being exposed to a new language, and it’s got to learn from examples how to understand it. The good news, though, is that Wolfram|Alpha is getting a lot of examples. Already a couple of orders of magnitude more than a child ever gets.
One of our big activities this summer has been inventing new techniques to take advantage of all this. It’s very interesting science. Much of it based on NKS. We’ve made some great advances, which we’re steadily implementing in the Wolfram|Alpha system.
The results so far are quite encouraging. In just a couple of months, we’ve reduced the “fall-through rate” of queries we don’t understand by 10%. And this is just the beginning. The techniques we’ve invented can clearly go a lot further. And we have all sorts of ideas for completely new techniques.
One of the fascinating things for me about the Wolfram|Alpha project is the way it mixes deep theoretical ideas with very practical implementation.
And one of the great achievements this summer has been streamlining the implementation. New data comes into Wolfram|Alpha all the time. But we had a plan that once a week we would update the underlying code of Wolfram|Alpha.
Some people in our development team thought this was impossible. But working on Mathematica for the past 20+ years, we’ve come up with some pretty good software engineering techniques—particularly making use of Mathematica itself to do system building, testing, and deployment.
Well, I’m happy to report that we have indeed managed to make the idea of one code update per week for Wolfram|Alpha work. In fact, it’s been working every week for the past 13 weeks!
So what’s been in all those updates?
I should explain that through the course of the summer we’ve been steadily expanding the Wolfram|Alpha development team, adding a lot of very talented people from around the world.
But in writing this blog post, I just looked up what’s actually happened to the Wolfram|Alpha codebase since launch. And I have to say that I’m quite astonished: it’s grown by a staggering 52%—adding well over 2 million lines of Mathematica code.
There have also been nearly 50,000 manual groups of changes to our data repositories over the past 3 months.
It’s hard to have a good metric for how many completely new knowledge domains we’ve added. But based on new source files, and new underlying databases, I think it’s been between 10% and 15%. (There’ll be other blog posts talking about the specifics—though we tend to be a bit bashful about new domains when they’re first added; they usually take a little while to reach maturity, and by then they don’t seem as new to us.)
One of the most difficult things about keeping our weekly update schedule is getting testing done.
We test Wolfram|Alpha at many levels. Its data, both static and real-time. Its underlying computation. Its linguistic processing. Its presentation layer. And its web operation.
Continually through each day we’re building new versions of the Wolfram|Alpha system, and doing automated tests. Over the course of the summer, we’ve dramatically increased the number and types of tests we have, both custom-built and derived from actual query streams.
Of course these tests find bugs, which we’re continually fixing. (Each week, Monday and Tuesday are bug-fixing days for all our developers.)
But what’s really great is how many users of Wolfram|Alpha send in helpful bug reports and suggestions. In fact, it’s been a big effort just to keep up with all of them.
As of now, of all the feedbacks we’ve received, we’ve classified 54,233 of them as bugs or suggestions. Of these, 31,006 are now in our implementation queue, boiled down to about 5800 to-do items.
At the beginning of the summer, we were taking care of about 250 to-do items from all sources per week. Now it’s up to nearly 600 per week.
And so far we’ve been able to tell 3907 people that the bugs they reported have been fixed.
It’s really very exciting watching Wolfram|Alpha develop. Every day there are zillions of little changes and fixes that get made (”add an extra name for a type of spider”; “fix the timezone for an outlying settlement”; etc.), while major new domains and frameworks are getting built up.
There’s also infrastructure development. Making Wolfram|Alpha run well on more web browsers. Optimizing performance. People may have noticed recently that there are no longer URLs like www12.wolframalpha.com; it’s always just www.wolframalpha.com. That seemingly minor change reflects a large engineering effort to optimize load balancing between our colocation facilities.
In addition to new content, we’ve been working very hard on new delivery and interface mechanisms for Wolfram|Alpha, which we expect to be able to announce quite soon.
It’s been a great first summer for Wolfram|Alpha. It was a mad dash to launch Wolfram|Alpha when we did. But we’ve actually built up over the summer to an even greater development intensity, though now with a progressively larger team and increasingly streamlined development systems.
These are exciting times. The vision of Wolfram|Alpha is really working! With every day bringing new advances. Progressively building up the largest coherent repository of human knowledge ever assembled.
Which we’re now getting ready for its “fall traffic”…
keep up working, guys!
wolframalpha is so promising.
I am looking forward to doing more research based info on the lines of sociology and how persons catch on to new technology resources.
One of the great medical benefits of an engine like this, provided the information can be safely conveyed, will be the ability to mine data for a cumulative analysis of pharmacological and radiological treatments and studies, if this could ever be conjoined with the effort to organize these records electronically. Thanks.
Cuando se podra usar W/A en español?
Great job, is a very good tool, but When will be available in Spanish.
THX.
My goodness, this isn’t a blog post but a book.
Anyway we can get a summarized “bullet-point” elevator version?
Too lazy to read?
i’m not too lazy, i just have more important things to do. there were tons of words and very little content. how ironic that he acknowledges that language is changing but then proceeds to spill out very poorly written, 20th century prose.
Actually, it’s well written prose. The rub is that there is only one important point in every couple of paragraphs. Hence the need for a a bulleted version for people who may not have as much time to enjoy the prose and others.
“Actually, it’s well written prose.”
Uh, no. This guy needs an editor like a hippie needs a bath. I read all thousand-someodd pages of NKS and found a chapter or two’s worth of actual information inside. Stephen Wolfram has done a fabulous job of convincing himself he’s invented the science he’s rediscovered. And starting sentences with prepositions. Other than that, it’s a lot of hot air.
Stephen, what you commented on the language is probably going to be one of the big changes in human communication in the next decades, may be even faster. If one wants to better understand what is going on in this area one has to observe the kids and the young persons communicating over their cell phones. The language they are developing there is so stripped of every useless content that i find it incredible how much waste we carry around while communicating. I have read several messages my kids sent with SMS and the language used is incredibly intuitive and after only a little practice you start enjoying communicating that way. As you also say it, it is probably much closer to what is going on in our brains, maybe for freeing up the brains capacity to take the next step in perceiving the universe we are living in.
Lera Boroditsky published in EDGE an article on how language maybe shaping our thinking, well here I think it is more our thinking that is shaping a new language. Maybe this approach is of help when trying to solve the language issues.
i agree, it is both ways the language is changing, coz the way we think and percieve it, is also changing, or rather I add, it is mutating and evolving with the advent of new communication media like with digital bottlenecks of time and speed, SMS, twitter, e-mails, it is transforming the civilization at breathtaking pace…
First I’d like to say thanks for the great blog and all the information. I’ve been using w/a since day one and I have to say I find all sorts of uses for it… I think Stephen and his entire team are to be congratulated on developing something really unique here and should be applauded for taking so many suggestions and turning them into features. Keep up the awesome work and I will keep looking for new ways to use w/a, it’s lots of fun!
Congratulations,
Chet
bing it on buddy.
En el futuro de Wolfram Alpha debemos visualizar un traductor- diccionario de idiomas; observemos que uno de los ingredientes para que GOOGLE se esparciera por el mundo es el manejo inteligente de idiomas, como la sensibilidad de direccionar su búsqueda en la RED de acuerdo al idioma. Además debido a que le auguro una interesante perspectiva en las búsquedas en redes INTRANET sobre Base de Datos especializadas, el manejo del idioma pasa a ser fundamental, gracias por darme la posibilidad de participar y SIGAN ADELANTE
In the future of Wolfram Alpha visualize a translator-dictionary languages; Let’s look at that you one of the ingredients for GOOGLE spread the world is the intelligent management of languages, as the sensitivity of address your search in the RED according to the language. In addition because predict you an interesting perspective in searches in networks INTRANET on specialized database, the management of the language becomes essential, thank you for giving me the possibility to participate and forward
I wanted to do calculations on Gibbs free energy. Alpha doesn’t appear to know what it is.
Thanks for realizing the dream!
Chris
Great work. Even though you say that you want to give new things time to develop before promoting them and once they’re ready they don’t feel new anymore you still should develop a systematic and organized way of doing so. After all, all of science is exactly the same way, and if you can’t even curate data regarding your own product you don’t have a hope of doing it for science at large.
Also, a lot of non-technical, non-scientific queries are less scattershot than the more scientific ones due to communal sources of an awareness of ignorance. That is to say that currently you are getting a lot of healthcare queries because of something external from most people’s personal lives and interests: politics. At other times you might gat a lot of a certain type of query because of some thing that was on television the night before. In the latter case it is very difficult to predict query trends and have new data available in time for when the queries are made, but in the former it is quite predictable and tailoring at least some of your data curation to that fact will greatly improve your customer satisfaction, especailly among lay customers with less interests in seeing a project develop rather than just getting their answer and forgetting everything that failed to give them an answer.
So, for example, right now “violations of the geneva conventions” brings up nothing. Not only is this sort of query very useful for legally-oriented people generally, but it will assuredly becaome a popular query some time in the next year or two. Similar fall-throughs are “evidence of global warming”, “gay marriage laws around the world”, etc. I think you will see a much larger return per resource invested if you focus some of it specifically where queries are likely to be focused down the road.
Quisiera saber si se puede invertir en este producto y asi tanto ustedes como los inversionistas puedan crecer y sacar provecho mutuamente.
Saludos!!
PLEASE IN SPANISH
Keep up the good work!
Amazing effort.. Keep going Wolframalpha…
We want to see more..
All the best.
quando sarà possibile avere disponibile il blog ed la possibilità di interagire in italiano? grazie è un progetto estremamente interessante e cambierà tante cose nell’uso dei pc.Enzo Siciliano
Please add an api. Thanks.
Cuando sera posible contar con la Informacion en espaniol..
por Otra parte de donde es la fuente de la poblacion de las ciudades y las distancias entre una y otra..
de antemano gracias pinta bien el Wolfra
Will Wolfram|Alpha ever become Wolfram|Beta?
You have to think in spanish version, the second languaje in the world.-
Thanks a lot!
Em Portugues Brasil por favor. Vocês mandam esse newsletter mas o texto tá em inglês. Seria muito bom se tivesse em outras linguas.
Wolfram Alpha has great things very great things. I have been a fan of yours from the Math matica time line …keep up the great work-everryone
I’m working on upper atmosphere etc.
Thank you
Tremenda herramienta, sigan trabajando muchachos, el tiempo será su mejor aliado, también estoy esperando la versión en español, pero igual me da gusto saber que hay gente trabajando para mejorar nuestros conocimientos.
Saludos desde Honduras
SVP ya pas ce site en français?
Thanks a lot for your concern
I would like to know how exactly you are using NKS to improve Wolfram|Alpha. I like the idea of NKS, and think examples of it being used (and how it is being used) for practical purposes would be VERY interesting.
I am sure you will be successful and I wish you Best Luck. I know this is the real next big thing and a technological milestone which will be remembered for ever…
Thanks for the update.
I think it would be interesting and very useful if Wolfram/Alpha became conversational. By this I mean if Wolfram/Alpha was not clear on what a query sentence meant it would enter a disambiguating conversation with the user.
proximamente va a salir un nuevo buscador que parece basado en la misma tecnología que WA pero centrado en el area de viajes. Se llama bifogg o befogg y su intención es hacer búsquedas que devuelvan resultados a cuestiones como… quiero un hotel romantico con wifi gratis en el centro de moscú. A eso , en teoria, segun dice su creador , daría una lista hoteles , al precio más barato que se ciñen a la cuestion. En definitiva, otro paso adelante en el desarrollo de la llamada web semántica.
Creo que wa tiene la tecnología , pero no creo que los datos que proporciona le den mucho dinero al equipo creador. A menos que comercialicen la tecnología en sí.
Me gustaria que os fuera bien, porque todo adelanto debe ser premiado, y vuestro buscador es un paso importante necesario para la web que viene.
Un saludo
Daniel Mallorca
The original launch was so disappointing, it is hard to generate the interest to check back and see if you have accomplished anything.
Bad strategy to launch before you had a useful product.
Keep up the good work! WolframAlpha is an excellent resource as long as you use it for its intended purpose. I can’t wait to use it through Bing!
Congratulations for this new and performant search engine, perhaps I have same problems with it : it is very heavy to charge in internet explorer. I think that it is possible to made him lighten then it is. For the others function I try to discover them.
Thank for you
The answers to my music questions are still horribly wrong. Gimme a crack at rewriting it for you (whoever wrote the answers/algorithms clearly has no understanding of harmony whatsoever!).
…now we can think new ways to teach Physics
Congratulations to the development team on what sounds like a fruitful summer harvest. While “lines of code” is a crude metric, very few software shops in the world can even dream of rolling out two million lines of working code in a single summer. It surely takes a lot of effort just to read all those user requests and boil them down to about 6,000 to-do items, but it’s even more impressive that the team is now completing those to-do items at a rate of 600 per week (up from 250 per week).
Automated software testing is what I do for a living now, so it’s not at all surprising to read that testing played a key role in their achievement. I expect that the team is spending a lot of time thinking about the role of testing in large-scale software development. As code bases get larger, I’ve had to reconsider my basic concepts of a “test”, just as thinking about AI forced me to reconsider my concept of “intelligence”. As Mr. Wolfram stated, these are exciting times…
Great job, is a very good tool, but When will be available in arabi
Best wishes.I think I could see a vailable search engine which can help us all.Keep awaiting
See Galatea 2.2,by Richard Powers
Creo que por los comentarios que he leido, existe consenso en que es importante que exista mas apertura para usuarios de otros idiomas. Seguramente esta herramienta sera muy importante en la medida que amplie su vision y desde luego creo que lo lograra en un futuro próximo. Saludos hispanohablantes.
I think it’s very good now. But it seems like only can analysis some nouns. If i input a sentence like “how can i get to ohio ?” it can’t get me any answers …
Google Squared appears to be similar to my patent application:
Frankly, I am getting a Déjà vu effect while going through the “Google Squared” application because it appears to be very similar in function to my United States patent application which was filed on April 12, 2007 and as publicly disclosed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 16, 2008, when the patent application was published.
My patent application is titled as “Method And System For Research Using Computer Based Simultaneous Comparison And Contrasting Of A Multiplicity Of Subjects Having Specific Attributes Within Specific Contexts” bearing Document Number “20080256023” and Inventor name “Nair Satheesh” which may be viewed at http://patft.uspto.gov/ upon Patent Applications: Quick Search.
Google Squared appears to be using at least some if not many of the same methods and systems as set forth by me more than two years ago in my patent application. In fact there are many more methods and systems disclosed in my patent application which I believe will help resolve certain inaccuracies found in current Google Squared application.
I have issued legal notices to Google through my Patent Attorney in the US but Google has not responded yet to any of my notices.
Dear Wolframalpha
I am an italian who is having often problems with thecnical vocabularies in different languages.
It would be important to be able to change from one language to another.I hope Wolframalpha will soon be also in Italian. You are doing a fantastic work, keep going.
Emilio Fantappiè
Hai, Congratulations for this New search engine, best of luck
I would like to see a more formal dictionary of how to word things and have a way to force W/A to read what is typed. I type my last name that has many cities and other uses (aside from last name) but W/A insists on breaking it into two irrelevant words. It does this a lot but of course I notice it on my last name more.
Well done Wolfram Team. Seems you are working hard.
However, this blog isnt quite a blog. May be, you could have editors to review before posting. Its a mixture of (self) review and reporting. A blog for this sort of project should rather be focused only on reporting and leave the review to users.
Secondly, it is too long. If a lot is happening, why not consider weekly or daily snippet blogging. That also would keep Wolfram in the front for those who use it and bring others. Reading a blog once every quarter seems odd in this days. It is clear that you are doing a lot, we might like to be kept more up-to-date than this.
All the best and keep the good work going.
I too am bashful at setting up a course of study. When you first launched alpha tried to refine my questions with broad categories that I myself would do a search in. There is something incredibly mysterious about being able to invent problems that are doable that yet don’t hold a student’s hand too much and give him the opportunity to own a problem.
While some might want an alpha to just answer questions and bring results; I want a tool to give me the credibility to myself that I can do my own research.
Initially, I was concerned with the former, but now, as I test my own mettle, I am curious what the latter might mean.
Solicito toda la informacion en Español
What is a (your) gadget. What effect will I notice if I download it?
Thank you.
The name “wolfram alpha” sounds ridiculous for a search/knowledge engine. It simply
shows the lack of imagination in naming a product.