54,233 Bug Reports and Suggestions

Among other things, the team held true to its promise to make at least one code update per week and there have been over 50,000 manual changes to Alpha's data sets over the last three months. Since its launch, Alpha's codebase has also grown over 50%. The team added over 2 million lines of Mathematica code to the project in the last three months.

In addition, Wolfram has also steadily hired more developers to work on Alpha. As Stephen Wolfram points out (with the precision only an engineer could really appreciate) the team received over 54,233 bug reports and suggestions. 31,006 of these "are now in [the] implementation queue, boiled down to about 5800 to-do items." 3907 people so far heard that the bugs they reported have been fixed.

All of this, of course, means nothing if the "computational knowledge engine" doesn't return the right results. What is more important here than all the engineering data, is that Alpha's "fall-through rate" - that is, the number of queries that users entered that it simply couldn't understand - has now been reduced to about 10%.

This is still a pretty high number and there are still a lot of areas where Alpha just doesn't know enough yet, though according to Wolfram, a lot of the things that people want to know that Alpha doesn't know yet are on the company's to-do list.

Wolfram also mentions that the team plans to give users more options to get actively involved in the project. He did not go into any specifics, however.

Ready for School

As the fall semester is just around the corner and as Alpha's current users are most likely to be students and academics, it is good to see that development on Alpha moved ahead during the summer. Wolfram stresses that this is a long-term project and that the team is constantly adding new data sources and new ways to query these databases.

If you haven't used it yet, have a look at this "Chemistry 101" post on the Alpha blog for some inspiration.

The Wolfram Alpha team will also make the latest version of its updates available for a limited number of outside testers before it goes live. If you would like to become a test for Wolfram Alpha, you can sign up here.

Here is a more complete list of updates:

• Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions
• More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. "US military vs. UK")
• Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. "germany gdp vs population")
• More complete handling of government positions (e.g. "chancellor", etc.)
• Updates to country borders for India, China, Slovenia, Croatia, and others
• Updates to naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions
• Additional subcountry regions (e.g. "Wales"); many more to come
• Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. "Iran time")
• City-by-city handling of U.S. states with multiple timezones
• Updates to certain European currencies (e.g. for "Cyprus" and "Slovakia")
• Some additional historical events; many more to come
• Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. "2 or 3 aces")
• Additional output for partitions of integers (e.g. "partitions of 47")
• Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. "ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2")
• Additional support for Mathematica 3D graphics syntax
• Additional support for stock prices with explicit dates
• Support for planet-to-planet distances and "nearest planet", etc.
• Extra information when comparing incompatible units (e.g. "ergs vs. newtons")
• Improved linguistic handling for many foods (e.g. "love apple")
• More mountains added, especially in Australia
• Support for many less-common given names (e.g. "zebulon")
• More "self-aware" questions answered (e.g. "how old are you")
• More consistent handling of sidebar links to Wikipedia, etc.

Are You Using Alpha?

When we first reviewed Wolfram Alpha in early May, we gave it a mixed review, based on how uneven its search results were when looking at some topics outside of the engineering and live sciences. Alpha got a lot of hype before and right after its launch, but things have been relatively quiet since then. According to Compete, which just uploaded its data for May today, Alpha had around 1.5 million unique visitors last month (as always, we recommend you take these numbers with a grain of salt). We will have to wait and see, of course, how many of these visitors just went to the site out of curiosity and how many will become loyal users.

Have you gone back to using Alpha after the initial release, or are you waiting for a better version to come around? Let us know in the comments.

Wolfram and his team will chronicle the launch in a live webcast on justin.tv, which will start at 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern tonight. We are not quite sure how Wolfram will manage the gradual launch over the weekend, though we assume that if you are on the preview waiting list, you will get first dibs.

Some Things to Keep in Mind

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you start experimenting with Alpha tonight or over the weekend:

• Wolfram Alpha is not a general purpose search engine - it does not directly compete with Google and if you treat it like Google, you will inevitably be disappointed.
• Check out the copious examples from the home page - they will give you a good idea of the type of queries that Alpha can handle best.
• Here is one thing we can almost guarantee: you will be disappointed at first (especially if you were expecting a Google killer).

  Alpha is a great tool, but it takes some time to learn its limits and strengths. Unlike Google, some searches simply don't return any results at all.

Using Alpha

Once you get access to Alpha, here are some tips for how to structure your searches and searches you should try:

• If Alpha doesn't give you the results you are looking for, try a different way of phrasing the query - sometimes even capitalization can make a difference!
• Try to search for anything that can be packed into data snippets (height of a mountain, chemical formulas, population stats, stars, planets, etc.) .
• Try combining two searches. Alpha usually does a great job with these kind of queries.
• Feed it some math problems. The fact that Alpha is based on Mathematica really shines through here.
• Do some test searches for food items or drugs.
• Let it solve some word puzzles for you. Just head to the "Words & Linguistics" section for some good examples.
• If you're a sports fan, look up some baseball or football stats: "passing touchdowns Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos."

Our Wolfram Alpha resources

Screenshots: See Wolfram Alpha in Action

Our Preview: Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions

Wolfram|Alpha will be an amazing product, but it's quite different from Google and other search engines. Indeed, maybe it is actually wrong to call it a search engine at all (and Wolfram prefers to call itself a "computational knowledge engine"). If you wanted to know what sights to see on your next trip to New York City, for example, Alpha, from what we've seen so far, will not be able to help you.

Our Review: Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha

At the end of the day, Wolfram Alpha is a tool; and once you take some time to learn its ways, it can become a very powerful tool. While a lot of media outlets have compared Alpha to Google, we think that this is a moot question. Alpha simply doesn't want to be a Google killer and, in its current form, won't take market share away from Google. As we reported in our first look at Alpha a few weeks ago, Alpha will take away some users from Wikipedia (but it's no Wikipedia killer either), as it can give those users quick and easy access to a wide range of data.

For now, we expect Alpha to remain a niche player. It will be a highly valuable tool for a small subset of potential users. Though, hopefully, over time the team will add more and better databases to draw information from so that Alpha will become more useful to a mainstream audience as well.

Videos

Stephen Wolfram's screencast demo of Alpha.

First Public Demo of Wolfram Alpha at the Berkman Center:

Stephen Wolfram and colleagues discuss the launch preparations:

Setting up the Wolfram Alpha data center (one of five W|A data centers):

Other Wolfram Alpha Reviews

Technology Review (compares Alpha to Google):

Generally, I did not use search terms that clearly had no computable answer (and therefore would have stumped Wolfram). But I also didn't throw any softballs in areas close to the heart of its makers: physics, chemistry, engineering, and genomics. On hard-core scientific questions, it gives you tons of symbols and graphics and other information that would be useful to a researcher but obscure to most people. But on many common questions for which there is no obvious data element, you will not get much help. In any event, if its plans hold, you should be able to test it out yourself in two or three weeks.

Search Engine Land (very in-depth look):

Wolfram Alpha's edge may be that it's a unique repository of general knowledge that imitates a search engine (unlike Wikipedia, which has no search engine feel). Of course, the killer combination would be for Wolfram Alpha to be partnered with a major search engine. It's something Wolfram said is being considered, though there are no formal discussions at the moment. The focus is really getting the service opened to the public and seeing how the initial reaction goes.

Telegraph:

How many times have you used to the internet to calculate the answer to a simple mathematical problem, for help with calculus, or for information on the GDP of Gibraltar? If the answer's, "not often", then it's going to be quite some time before Wolfram Alpha crops up as your search engine of choice.

What Will You Ask?

If you are looking forward to the launch of Wolfram Alpha, let us know what questions you want to ask in the comments. We'll try to answer the most interesting questions (try to give us specific queries!) with links to screenshots from the Wolfram Alpha preview in the comments until about 3pm PST today.