Watch the introduction to the service.
What would Oskar Lange think? What would Michael Polanyi think? I thank Danny Toone for the pointer.
WolframAlpha does economic computations
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This will be as big as google.
This will not be as big as google.
No doubt that was a snazzy demo, but I tried ~25 queries and none of them got results. It’s possible I was just using the system wrong, but all of the queries were very much along the lines of the demo’d queries. Which makes me think that the demo was a cherry-picked proof of concept.
It will be useful for someone to do the hard work of munging various data sets (census data, poll information, genomes, economic data, etc.) into a uniform, easy-to-access searchable format. But Google has a lot of money, and I think they will beat Wolfram at this game, despite the snazziness of his demo.
Wolfram Alpha will only do what it’s programmers have told it to do. And that is why it will fail.
try “consumption in usa”
I had the same experiences as mk and concur generally
What’s the point of an excessively reductionist search engine that attempts to encapsulate broad, nuanced and detailed concepts into a few words? They should stick to mathematics and leave social science to the social scientists. You can’t reduce things like “industrial revolution” down to a formula that returns certain results. This is foolish…oh, wait, isn’t that what economics purports to do?
It sounds like I should wait for Wolfram Beta.
For those saying that WA can’t do this, or can’t do that: I remember feeling the same way about Google and other search engines 10 or even 5 years ago. But now they *can* do a lot of the things that they couldn’t do back then. Time, engineering and research effort, and accumulated search and user experience data may improve things dramatically. However, if the last 5 years are any predictor: it will be Google, not Wolfram Research, that develops and distributes the successful version.
Ugh, it can’t tell me anything in response to “what is the farthest object in the Universe?”
what if i ask it to compute the last digit of pi?
Billare,
I think GDP per capita is more relevant. You get roughly the same graph, but recall that the EU’s GDP and growth will fluctuate wildly based on *who is in the EU.* The US’s dynamics would change quite a bit if suddenly we joined up with Mexico and Canada.
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