Wolfram|Alpha was advertised as a revolutionary knowledge engine designed to eclipse Google. The result is quite mixed. While the power of symbolic computation certainly helped people solve mathematical problems, Wolfram|Alpha still provides highly eccentric answers to queries like iOS. Instead of giving a description of Apple's flagship OS, the query results in a obscure Greek island. The knowledge engine even ignores case sensitivity. The far-from-satisfactory performance begs lots of questions. First is about knowledge model. Wolfram|Alpha works as a interpreter between human queries and knowledge databases. Given the sheer volume of human knowledge, it's natural that pure knowledge databases omit huge areas of public knowledge, and Wolfram|Alpha can only cover a very restricted domain. Compared with search engine's wide indexing of web pages, which of course contains falsehoods, Wolfram|Alpha is cleaner, but also very much less encyclopediac. How about depth? The trag...
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