Comments on: Useful Wolfram Alpha tips for webmasters and sysadmins

By: egal

egal — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:11:45 +0000

Why people is so negative with a great tool that as said on the main page is a project in continuos development and free? I guess all these people have done better things than WA, and it is far beyond to the toy calculations Google can do. Try an integral in Google, or just 2^2^2^2^2 to see what comes up.

Btw to the one making the comment:

works: distance from mars to the sun
does NOT work: distance to mars from the sun

Now both work properly.

By: links for 2009-05-26 « Mandarine

links for 2009-05-26 « Mandarine — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:11:13 +0000

[...] Useful Wolfram Alpha tips for webmasters and sysadmins Calculate data transfer time, Get data transfer rate for a network connection, Convert between uptime and downtime, Find out best-case ping times between locations, Convert between different units (MB, GB, TB, Kbps, Mbps, etc), Find out the local time anywhere. (tags: conversion reference tools searchengine) [...]

By: Adrian B

Adrian B — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:01:14 +0000

Did WA’s response time improved? If it still is as slow as it was when I tried it, it would be faster if you just do the calculations in Windows Calculator.

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:05:46 +0000

@Chris: Good point. On the other hand, while you can do many of the calculations in Google, IMHO Wolfram Alpha presents the results in a much better way (and with lots of bonus calculations thrown in).

By: rssfever » Useful Wolfram Alpha tips for webmasters and sysadmins | Royal Pingdom

Tue, 26 May 2009 04:07:26 +0000

[...] post by Pingdom aggregated by [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:26:49 +0000

Google has already been able to do most of this for a while now.

http://www.google.com/search?q=5+gigabytes+%2F+100+megabits%2Fsec
http://www.google.com/search?q=10+megabytes+%2F+5+seconds+in+megabits%2Fsec
http://www.google.com/search?q=24+megabits+in+megabytes
http://www.google.com/search?q=0.6%25+of+a+year
http://www.google.com/search?q=5+hours%2Fyear+in+percent
http://www.google.com/search?q=4+terabytes+in+megabytes
http://www.google.com/search?q=time+in+new+york

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Mon, 25 May 2009 18:31:56 +0000

@_ck_ You have a point there. The parsing of the input could definitely use improvement, but to be fair, this is a product that JUST launched. There is most likely a ton of development work going on behind the scenes as we speak, reacting to the user feedback the service has received.

Speaking of user feedback: Wolfram Alpha has a feedback box at the bottom of every page. Help them out and let them know about the “quirks” or errors you find, or functions you wish they had (like we did with uptime/downtime conversion). You can even do so anonymously if you prefer that.

By: _ck_

_ck_ — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:46:47 +0000

I was really excited about Wolfram Alpha when they did that amazing demo video but when it went live I suddenly realized how carefully scripted that demo was, showing only questions they knew it could answer.

There are SO many simple relationships it doesn’t understand, ie.

works: distance from mars to the sun
does NOT work: distance to mars from the sun

What’s up with that? If it can’t understand that simple reversal, there are so many variations it can never determine even though it “knows” the answer.