Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Wolfram Alpha (WA) was launched on  18th May. The reaction has been rather harsh in general because of the way it is touted as a Google killer but this really is to misunderstand what it is. It is not a search engine as such it is a more repository for facts with an advanced calculator or a Turing machine. It will have a stab at finding information but it is not a thinking machine that knows everything. I think that that many people were expecting an omniscient computer like Douglas Adams’ Deep Thought.  WA it is somewhat less powerful. It hasn’t…