After a eager post last month reporting on the launch of the Wolfram Alpha online analytic engine, we have sadly little in the way of a user review to offer, despite some good intentions. The concept of surpassing search with analytics and transforming unstructured, natural language queries into computations is great, but in these early days the site accesses too little data to be useful to this user.
The hype for this new, new thing just down the road in Champagne, the home of the University of Illinois, was too much to resist. And a bit premature, it seems.
The site launched with plenty of intriguing examples of the types of data it could access and manipulate. The following description from "An invention that could change the internet forever" in The Independent of the UK gives you the flavor:
