Why do technology evangelizers give Wolfram Alpha a free pass? It is quite clearly orders of magnitude less useful than Google. I have not yet seen the problem it solves. Everyone I know personally who's used it says it sucks. For even the simple computations it boasts that it can do well, it sucks awfully because its knowledge model is just not up to the job, and never will be. (I typed "murders in Oakland" and it didn't have a clue. Google, meanwhile, autocompleted my query for me and returned 2.5 million hits.)

Meanwhile, the proselytizers love it. Tim O'Reilly gushed over it. All of this seems to be about "promise". Never mind the fact that Wolfram's repertoire to date hardly inspires confidence. Mathematica itself is overpriced, and only superior to Maple if you really care about cellular automata (hey, I love them, but I've also got equations to solve). Moving Mathematica from one computer to another is a major headache: you have to go through corporate channels to get a re-licensing. It BITES ASS.

Wolfram's other main opus is "A New Kind of Science", which is hideously self-aggrandizing to most people who actually do science, and is mostly a collection of coffee-table images plus a proof that a particular 1D CA is Turing-complete.

Why is no-one pointing out that the Emperor is stark bollock naked? Google has been around for a few years now and has a lot of challengers. Can we just agree that Wolfram Alpha is CONSIDERABLY less use than Google, and for the foreseeable, always will be? And in fact, that it's currently WORSE THAN USELESS? (One counterexample of a successful use case please.) Or do we have to suffer more of this tedious everything-new-is-wonderful "it is expected to be really useful when it improves at some indefinite point in the future" hype?

More on the BB comment thread, including Rudy's mellow response, and an accusation that I am a "hater" (you treasure those, don't you?)

-- IanHolmes - 26 May 2009