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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Couple of comments.

First, it's an awesomely cool idea. Congrats to the Wolfram team for pulling it off so far.

Second, it's a freaking huge project. As much as they have, I can't help but think they're only about a 100th of the way towards something that might be truly comprehensive. Maybe a 1000th of the way.

Still -- kudos for setting it up. I sincerely hope it grows and becomes all that it can be. It will definitely take web research to a new level.

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Mathematica itself has a rich plugin (packages) model that extends it to particular domains. It's a very important part of the system, sort of like extensions make Firefox.

Perhaps they'll open Alpha up in a similar way to help make it comprehensive. Can you imagine how powerful this thing could become if third parties are also developing for it?

There's a Q&A with press and someone asks this questions and Wolfram essentially says that yes they very much want third party participation, the only caveat being that there would be some manual review process of the data for accuracy.

So ultimately I think thats what this is like a Google Base + computation where they have added (hopefully) enough of the core to push it over the hill.

A place to put structured data where it can be fully leveraged minimal effort from the data provider.

Impressive technology, BUT... I've just tried Wolfram Alpha with a preview account, and I have to express my complete disappointment. It seems to me that Wolfram Alpha is a classic example of geeks building application that is useful for them but that is irrelevant to the other 99% of the world. And that 99% are the buying customers. I tried some usual web search phrases, and for each of them "Wolfram wasn't sure what to do with my data". It even suggested some alternative searches, but when I clicked, it still wasn't sure. Of course, it was happy to analyse some sinus function for me, but imagine how many people would like that? In my opinion, Wolfram will be an excellent niche search engine for mathematicians, statisticians, and the geeks alike, but nothing near Google in any respect.

This and Google are serving two different purposes. Google is an interface to search the web. Wolfram Alpha is an interface to search their own database of facts and relationships. When you use Wolfram Alpha you are doing a fact search, not a web search.

The economic and financial data alone will give Wolfram more paying customers than he can support. Just think about Bloomberg.

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