Wolfram Alpha now live

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New advanced search engine Wolfram Alpha is now live, following a webcast of the site’s final stages of testing over the weekend.

Since its announcement back in March this year, excitement about the fact-based engine that aims to throw back exact answers rather than related answers has grown significantly.

“In the first 24 hours of our launch weekend, we received nearly 10,000 messages forwarded from the feedback forms on the bottom of each Wolfram Alpha page. The compliments have been very gratifying,” the Wolfram Alpha launch team wrote on their blog.

“The feedback has been insightful and entertaining. You’ve offered lots of suggestions, from additional domains and analysis to computations that have gone awry.”

As expected, there have been a few teething issues since launch, with some users getting answers that don’t quite pass muster.

“About 70 per cent are getting good meaty answers, actual specific answers to their questions, the remainder are getting our fall through page where there are suggestions of things that might work better for you,” one of Wolfram Alpha’s launch team said in a video posted on the blog.

“I think that’s a pretty good ratio considering that these are people from the wild coming in without coaching,”

Demand for the site during the launch period was high. Some people received “load too high” messages in error, depending on which server their IP directed them to, even when there was room for them to use the engine. This issue is currently being investigated and the team hope to resolve it soon.

IT PRO will be sharing our first impressions of the newly launched search engine shortly.

Click here to see what readers want to ask Wolfram Alpha.

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