Comments Off
Wolfram|Alpha just went live for the very first time, running all clusters.
This first run at testing Wolfram|Alpha in the real world is off to an auspicious start, although not surprisingly, we’re still working on some kinks, especially around logging.
While we’re still in the early stages of this long-term project, it is really gratifying to finally have the opportunity to invite you to participate in this project with us.
We are very grateful for the outpouring of support that we have received over the past two months. And for the enthusiastic interest that was shown this evening, especially in the last few minutes.
We got off to a late start, but so far, so good. We’ll stay up for as along as it makes sense to test the system with external access and gather the data we need. Then we’ll take Wolfram|Alpha offline for a while. We’ll continue testing through the weekend, opening access on occasion.
For those of you trying out the system for the first time, welcome! To anyone waiting in line due to capacity limits, thanks for your patience. We really appreciate it.
You can continue to watch us in action over on justin.tv.
Congrats for the effort.
While I haven’t been able to get Alpha generating any good/useful answers until the system was overloaded with questions, I will be waiting and trying again.
Good luck and all the best.
Congratulations on the launch! Wolfram|Alpha is amazing so far… I can’t wait to see where this will go in the future!
No time stamp on the blog posts, I’m confused to exactly when Wolfram went live..
Congrats!!!! Amazing combo-breakkkkkkerr.
I’m Brazilian guy and i hope what de wolfram understand portuguese
I could test it with some questions and the answers was very good. In some cases it didn’t understand me, but I think it is gonna get better with time.
Greetings from Argentina!
Thank you for this invention. I am so eager to try it and again and again. Best Regards
Well done I feel I watched history tonight. This will change the way people learn and the way people will have to teach.
Jim
Great stuff. Looking forward to getting started with the API.
Well done, Wolfram Team. If this is the starting point, I’m intrigued to see what is possible in a year.
Query: Is Alpha in beta? 🙂
Very impressive presentation. Did you hire Tufte to consult on it? Taken as a whole, the information is well-conveyed and with more polish than any web presentation I’ve seen before.
You’ve set the bar quite high for every web designer who presents information.
I think the first improved will be the adding of links within the search so you can then link up all the data you’ve made in one continued search. rambling man, but I like it so far
Absolutely fantastic! Well done! I am very impressed. Thank you for making this possible.
Congratulations on the achievement!
I was pretty excited this evening and very impressed with the performance. Then I sat down and wrote a blog post. However, the more I wrote about it, the more I am worried …
http://drupalsliu.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/wolframalpha/
I hope Dr. Wolfram and the WolframAlpha team can look into the transparency and context issues seriously as scientists instead of internet entrepreneurs whose only goal is to take control of the world from Google. Think about our future scientists.
I am some what impressed but you need to improve on words like SEO, SEM , Internet Marketing , SMO etc etc
Great way to start. I am beginning to love this . Why can’t I see the interpenetration for Computational ?
You have created an amazing product, I really look forward to the continued development of Wolfram Alpha. Thanks for all your effort!
Well done. I watched the live feed. Of course there were glitches, but your results present an entirely different and needed twist on hard scientific data reporting and collection. Excellent effort thus far.
Another blog post about the site going live
http://buckycomputing.net/blog/wolfram-alpha-goes-live/
Guys i know it’s all hands on deck, but PLEASE take a moment to smile and relish in the moment.
This is the moment you have all worked so hard for, this is THE WORLD MEETS MATHEMATICA!
Kudos. stunning job guys the data WA is returning is totally insane i’m loving it!
Flash this comment up on the control center big screen for all the crew.
GO WA!
So far so good. I am looking forward to see how much it will improve in the coming months. Hopefully the Alpha team will be able keep up with most of the important requests.
Congratulations for the amazing achievement.
Site looks very good, but running very slowly. I hope it gets better after some, I guess it may
be because of the huge traffic that wolfgramalpha might be getting right now.
All the best for the future.
why after typing in “current users” did it first show a map / graphs and other details then
We’re sorry…
Wolfram|Alpha is currently
under extreme load
and can’t immediately handle your
request. Please try again later.
— The Wolfram|Alpha Team
then i refresh and now it says about electronics
Get this error, seems it is overloaded.
“Sorry, Wolfram Alpha is temporarily unavailable. Please try again.
Error: DataPacletFilter: Unable to get Connection Cannot create PoolableConnectionFactory (Too many connections)”
Congratulations! Good job!
Don’t stop this project. This is one of the most important things happened in the last years.
Keep on.
Seems to be fascinating. Have to learn the “new way” but it works. Thanks for the Tool!
This result display is confusion for query “1 lb kg”
Input interpretation:
1 lb (pound) | kg (kilogram)
Unit conversions:
1 lb : 2.205 lb
0.4536 kg : 1 kg
should I read horizontal or vertical? Is it a bug?
Great job, Wolfram|Alpha team! I’ve been playing with the system and can see its potential. Would be nice if it showed images related the item being queried, though. For example, I entered “iguana” but received mostly informational feedback but no visual “aids”, which would have been a nice touch. Aside from that, I loved the ability to compare different countries. The information provided was substantial and informative. Again, wonderful job!
Wow – congratulations to this project… did already some questions… I am really baffled.
Would have suspected that the system will be massive overloaded in the first day(s)
Sorry.
I am not as impressed as these people seem to be.
It is a great resource, I suppose for students. More of a teachers aid than a search site.
IMHO
Fred
Just tried some first queries – It will take some time to use it intuitivly
Good in GDPs, weather, stocks, statistics about locations, math.
But else?
It seems you got a lot of work to do!
Good luck
Congratulations on putting this up for the people! like the idea very much!
Great stuff!! Just loving wolfram, especially after loving this review : http://www.pluggd.in/wolframalpha-search-engine-review-297/
the launch was bigger than watching a man walk on the moon!!!
Accept my greetings for this excellent start! We can’t wait to have our API application approved to try integrating Comindwork project management software with Wolfram|Alpha powerful engine. I believe this has a huge potential for increasing knowledge work productivity in knowledge-intensive organizations.
Very nice. It seems to me that a potential limitation of the project as it scales in size is the need for Wolfram to provide and maintain the underlying databases that Alpha uses. Are there any plans to provide a mechanism for the “community” to add additional databases to the system – perhaps in a way analogous to a wiki? Alpha could of course caveat any results returned from unverified community data sources. This would seem to provide a means for Alpha to grow rapidly.
As much as I congratulate you and as much as I am stunned with the results of the machine, I must state, that the launch of Wolfram Alpha is a black friday for webstandards. You may be geniuses in math, thats for sure, but folks we’re livin in 2009 and there is hardly any reason to render text in images or not to use modern webstandars such as XHTML, MathML, Canvas, SVG to produce results accessable for everyone.
Please start migrating to W3C standards!
Hello, this is the greatest search engine ever !!! GOOD JOB!!!
PLEASE CONSIDER to add “ROMANIAN” language too !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it is very important to have multilanguage search engine !!!!! thank you very much
Congrats, guys! I’ve been looking forward to this for the past… week or so, but it was really exciting. Frequent blogposts ftw and I also liked the screencast very much.
I watched the live feed yesterday until 3am my time, but it was worth it 😛 Good job documenting the launch. Sure there were technical glitches and stuff, but that’s all fine. It’s part of the process and it makes historic footage great. The moonlanding isn’t superbly Steadicammed either, but that’s not the point. It’s no art, it’s history. So good job!
Just been trying Wolpha out, lots of great results, though I see there’s still a lot it needs. For example, when querying “Mozart”, it has no idea what I’m talking about, but I’m sure that’s something to come.
So keep up the good work!
from germany
very good job is going here .. how can I contribute for it ?
just let me know
pas trop le top ce moteur de recherche 🙂
c’est pas mon genre
Wolfram|Alpha is amazing and I can find everything of I want from chemistry.
But one thing is iritating. This search browser doesn’t answer about too stupid questions.
Congrats on launching Wolfram alpha ,it will be useful to students ,mathematicians ,scientists and others .
It’s mind-numbingly slow. Surely you must have expected heavy traffic.
It doesn’t understand what to do with zip codes. I’m a little startled.
Example:
Assuming “22314 to 22304” is a mathematical object | Use as referring to a calendar computation instead
or
22304 demographics -> Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.
How many people in 22304? -> Assuming multiplication | Use a list instead, Input interpretation:Mathematica form all countries | population 22304. Result:Show details
148.9 trillion people (2006,2007,2008 and 2009 estimates)
Maybe Wolfram Beta will better be able to provide demographic data.
It can identify New York City, Manhattan and Staten Island. However, It does not know about the Bronx or Queens. It only knows about Brooklyn in CT and OH.
population in zip code 22304
current population estimate | 46256 people
population density estimate | 10 157 people/mi^2
(excepting current estimates, based on 2000 census)
its doesn’t seem to be slow and was quite fast when i tried. I wanted to replace google but sadly i have to use google for web search again.
With mathematics, geography, population etc for so many things it was great and was so surprised with the results and result display style as it was including so much of detail.
But for web search it gave nothing saying not to sure what to output or something like. e.g. if i search my name in google it will show my site codefight.org and other related stuffs. But it didn’t show anything.
Then i searched for wolfram and it gave detail about wolfram. This is just a quick test and quick response. I feel lucky to be one of the tester in first days of live.
That’s because Wolfram|Alpha is not a web search engine. Google and WA complement each other actually.
it doesn’t compute combined queries like “(place of birth michel gondry) to (place of birth wes anderson)” when for example “place of birth michel gondry” give us the correct answer.
“e.g. if i search my name in google it will show my site codefight.org and other related stuffs. But it didn’t show anything.”
hilarious! You are kidding, right?
what do you mean by its hilarious? I thought it searches web as well like google does. Do you mean its hilarious because i searched my name LOL.
Unless I am mistaken the system intentionally avoids subjects that might be controversial. I suspect there is an intellectual bias, or cowardice. Religion is a perfectly normal demographic point and it is relevant. Sex terms (penis, vagina) are undefined.
Beyond that it seems like place name algorithm is entirely munged. It doesn’t understand that there are multiple places with the same name. I looked up typical post-office town names and it was unable to find places.
I am sure its great for doing math but that seems like a pretty small domain.
Hey, you split my surname “Kimmel” and interpret it as the distance between “Kim, Sughd, Tajikistan” and “Mel, Veneto, Italy”. I don’t like that! 😉
Pretty nice, but I stumped you on the second US town I search
Hey DLG,
Maybe you have some sort of filter to stop your kids entering “rude” words. Type “fu_k” (you can guess the missing letter) and you’ll get lots of information. I typed penis and all sorts of information was returned, but unfortunately no data on average length to enable me to make comparisons to see how I measure up. 🙂
Also no data on correlation between penis length and show size.
Hilarious (size 15 shoes)
Every search return happens to crash Firefox, but not IE, you know what’s wrong?
You probably didn’t read his comment too well… the essential thing is that a friend of mine had to switch to chrome to get it running… so something is really breaking firefox in the wolfram code… hmmm…
It’s really fantastic what you managed to build!
Congratulations!
But could you PLEASE change the display to SVG and MathML instead if GIFs!!!
+1 on this one. That would really help when incorporating the results in other works and it would also improve the output quality for visually impaired people who use screen readers or browser zoom.
Congrats on the launch! Awesome engine (just FYI, the blog doesn’t display properly in IE7, works fine in other browsers).
hm…. a lot of good things, but a lot of things are still missing, which sometimes produces funny answers, e.g. “tristan and isolde” is a movie… nothing about the opera. Ah wait, “Opera” is also a movie…
Congratulations! I already blogged about this event!
Now that I can challenge it myself I guess it will be one of my favourite tools for news & facts research!
Great Job, Stephen!
Just tried a few more searches and found that it is not working with more complex computes like
(sphere radius=5) – (cylinder height=1 radius=2)
would be cool to get some functionality there – I see a lot of great possibilities in corporate use if the companies feed their own databases. Will probably blog my thoughts on that soon. I hope you are in contact with the people I am thinking about as that will be the ones paying that service for the rest of us – I assume …
It looks very pretty, did everyone mention that already? 😉
you just helped me champion the New York Times crossword puzzle. i heart you.
https://blog.wolframalpha.com/ only shows the first couple of lines in IE8. Have you test on IE8?
More like IE8 doesn’t work on this blog. Gotta love MS wrecking backward compatibility.
WA doesn’t seem to be able to access nielson ratings, perhaps proprietary? But much is publicly reported.
For some queries I am getting the correct input interpretation, but no results
distance to andromeda galaxy / distance to seattle
M 31 | current distance from Earth/distance | from Flagstaff, Arizona to Seattle,Washington
yeah – it works for luxemburg too. good job !!!! (even though it doesn’t know what exactly “martine” is 😉 )
Gets my vote – it gave an appropriate answer to “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck…”
On a more serious note, when asked for the surface area of the Earth, it also gave the relative
proportions of land and ocean area – nice to have some comparisons thrown in…
Very useful tool!
Great technology,
We’ll use it. Definitely.
We will even study how to extend Webzzle.com with the benefits of your system.
this query: life expectancy U.S. african american male
gave me this result:
United States | life expectancy | Africa | life expectancy | United States | male population
Great work! Infotainment at the worlds fingertips, brilliant.
Is there already smoke coming out of the datacentre? ;-P the servers are doing quite ok, considering the whole world is querying the most complex questions they can think of 😉
Very interesting presentation of information and data. I’m impressed with the possibilities.
This is pretty interesting! What language are u guys developing in? Firebug won’t tell me anythin grr lol
Input interpretation: language wolfram|Alpha is written in
answer: Mathematica.
mate check this out
http://www.wolframalpha.com/faqs.html
and this:
“biggest cities” – works
“biggest cities france” – doesn’t
“highest movies by box office total” – works
“movies by highest box office total” – doesn’t
“steven spielberg highest movies by box office total” – also doesn’t 😉
waiting for community feature.
CONGRATULATIONS!!! YOUR PROJECT IS ONE OF THE MOST AMBICIOUS PROJECTS I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE!!!
GREETINGS FROM MEXICO 😉
felicidades,sin duda,son una TREMENDA ayuda!!! Congratulaciones
Took WolframAlpha for test drive on my areas of interest. Results intriguing, but disappointing, on most subject matter of interest (I’m a tech marketing exec and consultant). Results summarized here. http://bit.ly/fWo4G
I wanted to compare Bavaria with Austria, but it seems not to even know about the first. Sure, I’ll tell you that Munich, as well as Nuremberg are in Bavaria, Germany, but search for Bavaria, and the only thing that comes up is some historical data.
Good work guys. This is great. Gonna be used tons for my uni work.
Personal best query
[us oil consumption / world oil consumption] / [us population / world population]
=5.342 (2004,2006 and 2007 estimates)
which means the U.S. uses 5.342 times the world wide per capita oil consumption, at least I think thats what it means!
Congratulation to everybody at Wolfram research.
I’ve spent a couple of hours playing with it and I’m impressed, it’s a really good start ! It’s not always easy to formulate your query correctly. but I feel like it’s getting there. I hope my hundreds of test where I got a “Cannot understand your query” will help your test dataset 🙂
Thanks for putting such a promising tool out there !
Great job, looking forward for future improvements. Nice to have the power of Mathematica online. What a fun for all those working at Wolfram Research.
Enjoyed watching turn on of site live on justin.tv Many talented people thinking thru some unexpected results live no pretense. This all resulted in a great service, WOLFRAMALPHA, being presented to the WORLD….
THANKS FOR THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE…….
Can’t interpret the phrase ‘tallest building in australia’ and crashes my browser every time I run a query….nice one, perfectly in line with my expectations from Wolfram.
I enjoyed comparing enrollment numbers for universities and language comparisons. I was also amused at typing “vous et nul autre” and having it tell me that it doesn’t yet understand French. And yet…it knew this was French… 🙂
Very much enjoyed being a part of the turn-up as an engaged viewer and chatter on JTV Friday evening. Much thanks to Mr. Wolfram for all his work and that of all the people working with him. A massive undertaking which is much appreciated. The dedication and love of what you are doing in the development of the next stage of how we use the Internet is inspiring. I am hoping Mr. Wolfram in the not to distant future will be writing a book about this!
This is a very interesting project! However, I’ve noticed some issues when routing browser requests through a Squid cache (Squid 2.5 in one case and Squid 2.6 in another).
For example, when going through the Squid cache:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=forecast+champaign%2C+illinois does NOT show graphics nor most of the data
http://www2.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=forecast+champaign%2C+illinois does show graphics and full data
Perhaps the configuration is different between these two addresses.
[…] While we’re still in the early stages of this long-term project, it is really gratifying to finally have the opportunity to invite you to participate in this project with us. Continue reading… […]