More, and Less, Wolfram Alpha

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:

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Added Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha's creator:

"We are just at the beginning. I think we've got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library."

So, eager to see try WA out, I tried to use the site to do some basic exploratory analysis for a client project we kicked off last month.  

The quick summary is this isn't ready for prime time from a general usefulness point of view.

Let's say I'm doing some work looking at general practice medicine in medium-sized markets in the U.S.  Here are some questions I might try, none of which yielded a successful result.

• "doctors in portland, or"
• "health care spending vs. GDP" 
• "health care in CA" 
• "doctors per capita"
• "hospitals spokane"
• "age demographics oregon" or "age oregon" 
• "medicaid spending"   

Similar searches for basic information about categories of small businesses produced similar results.

However, I can find that the International Space Station is somewhere above Iran right now traveling at just over 17,000 mph.

For now, WA provides access to an interesting, eclectic assortment of data, most of which is returned in almanac-type form.  But the areas covered are spotty and rather random, sort of a cross between the Guinness Book of World's Records and the Dangerous Book for Boys.

The basic vision -- making data and analysis accessible to non-technical users -- is powerful and compelling.  With the right data feeds and a further evolved query translation engine this will blow away spending years and $MMs on data warehouses and BI tools to put analytics in the hands of ordinary business users.  But for now the hype is way ahead of the reality.