Wolfram Alpha is actually really useful

I dunno why people are saying it's a failure and all. I had to do some math for this mech e course I'm in, and it had integrals with e's and i's and stuff. Not knowing how to integrate, especially with e's and i's, I went to wolfram alpha, told it to integrate some stuff and it gave me the answer. It's like having mathematica without having to pay for it.

also, a link to some stuff these guys used wolfram alpha for:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wolfram-alpha.php

After reading this blog post, I experimented as well with Wolfram Alpha and found it rather useful. I can also seeing this as a go-to place for Science-related majors that don't want to sift through the nonsense that Google can sometimes display. Even doing things like integrating Wolfram has a much clearer and distinct answer, as opposed to Google which will link you to pages that can possibly give you the answer.

In a lazy getting lazier world, something like this can definitely catch on to certain niches in academia. And if academia starts to use Wolfram more and more, it will be a lot easier for the general public to get accustomed to it, and use it either exclusively or in conjunction with Google.

Although clearly a joke, I think the something awful link illustrates an important feature of Wolfram Alpha. In the something awful link, the author displays the ability of WA to integrate multiple pieces of seemingly unrelated information into a single result. This is an important element that google lacks. None of the queries and results the author got are easily obtainable from google. For instance, a google search for 'box office ernest goes to camp united states gdp' gives a jumble of useless results.

I agree with the OP that Wolfram Alpha is getting too much undeserved hate. With regards to the concept of Social Networking, Wolfram Alpha is an important step towards allowing all users to share some very large set of knowledge: much like wikipedia, but on a deeper level.

i was one of the W-A haters when I first heard about it but after playing around with it I can see myself loving/using it. It is not for everyone and it is not going to take the place of google but for those of us who have to spend countless finding specific info (especially those int he science field) it is definitely useful. Instead of going through countless tables to find some constant I can simply type it in and get a much clearer result that I would on Google.
I showed WA to my Medill room-mate and thought she was not as excited as I was, she did admit she could find it useful in her studies.

I'm surprised that Wolfram Alpha produced a negative information cascade. I heard about it in a computer science course and most everyone was raving about it. I too was impressed with the site and told a bunch of kids who I thought would find it entertaining and useful. That having been said, I'm not surprised that a Medill student would be less excited about it than a class of computer science students. I guess information cascades still depend heavily on your social network.