It was really exciting when Alpha launched. It seemed like search was really going to be shaken up a bit.
I even remember Google being a little nervous, launching a big new public data service during Wolfram's big demo.
Anyone know what the plans are for Alpha moving forward? Are they now content with their specialized audience, or are they still trying to go for real marketshare?
It is also difficult to be explicit about types, such as what you mean if you input "orange", or "Washington", and it doesn't seem to allow grouping with parentheses, etc—though admittedly I gave up pretty quickly when I got inconsistent results.
It probably did become a better "computational engine" than Google Calculator, once Google Calculator seemed to shift to a smaller focus on what it could do.
At one point I thought maybe its best functionality was as an alternative to Wikipedia, when comparing different members of a category, because the information would be consistently structured. Yet, the source data is pretty terrible. One, because they appear to have had little strategy for keeping it current, and, two, because without user input it's even more likely that the source is something bizarre, when with Wikipedia someone with domain specific knowledge would have been able to lend a hand.
If I remember it correctly, after a thread on Reddit, they even implemented "refrigerator heights" and "fingernail years" as units to measure length.