flights visible from Modesto, CA
cepheids visible from Modesto, CA
distance from Mars to Jupiter
Now try them in WolframAlpha. See the difference?
Google is a search engine. It tries to find web pages that it thinks are relevant to those searches. It is very sophisticated at this, so as to try to figure out what pages actually have the information, and which just happen to have the words. However, since these are things that probably no one has written about on the web, you get nothing really useful.
WolframAlphas is NOT a search engine. It treats those same queries as requests to try to answer them from its databases or by computing them from things that are in its databases. So, for the first it figures out that you are interested in scheduled airplane flights that you can see from a particular location. It has airline flight data and radar tracking data, and from that, and it's model of visibility, it figures out what planes could possibly be seen from Modesto, taking into account their last known position and heading and extrapolating to account for the fact that the radar data it gets is behind by something like 15 minutes. (Click on a flight in the resulting list, and it gives you neat information about it, such as when it took off, how late that was, a plot of its course, graphs of altitude vs. time, groundspeed vs. time, and heading vs. time).
The second is similar. It figures out that Cepheids are a kind of star, gets a list of the 100 brightest Cepheids, and figures out which are above the horizon at Modesto, CA, right now.
For the third, it decides you are talking about planets (although you can tell it you mean Jupiter, FL and one of the several cities named Mars if you wish), and from their orbital information (which it has in its database) it calculates where they are now, and tells you the distance between them.
Now try something useful like: "where to buy low cost computers in miami florida"; or "what is the temperature of the water off the coast of miami beach".
Now try it in Google. See the difference. ;)
You right, WolfmanAlpha is not a search engine. It's a fancy encyclopedia.
Again, that's all 'really neat', but the headline of the story is stating that people need what they're doing, which is b.s., so long as I can't ask how many people are using Linux and get something like an answer. I don't need to know how many cephids are visible from Modesto, CA. If you do, Wolfram Alpha is 'really neat'.
The beautiful thing about Google is that most questions along the lines of 'what is the distance between Mars and Jupiter", or "how many mililitres are in a gallon?" have already been answered, somewhere, and Google will point you to the answer. If it aint broke, don't fix it. Now, I don't doubt there are applications for Wolfram Alpha (I've heard their API is what really gets people excited), but do 'people need what they're doing'? Not particularly. It's a lot of hype.
It sounds like you're just tryin to be argumentative. People need insulin shots too, but it would be rather pointless for a non-diabetic person to call B.S. on that. If you ever go to a funeral and you hear someone say "Everybody liked him", please do the bereaved a favor and don't correct the technical flaw in their statement.
The first result on Google for "what is the distance between Mars and Jupiter" is pretty close.. today. It's off by 100% if you want the distance on my birthday.
Many problems don't have static solutions which can be neatly cached by a search engine.
Google is a search engine. It tries to find web pages that it thinks are relevant to those searches. It is very sophisticated at this, so as to try to figure out what pages actually have the information, and which just happen to have the words. However, since these are things that probably no one has written about on the web, you get nothing really useful.
WolframAlphas is NOT a search engine. It treats those same queries as requests to try to answer them from its databases or by computing them from things that are in its databases. So, for the first it figures out that you are interested in scheduled airplane flights that you can see from a particular location. It has airline flight data and radar tracking data, and from that, and it's model of visibility, it figures out what planes could possibly be seen from Modesto, taking into account their last known position and heading and extrapolating to account for the fact that the radar data it gets is behind by something like 15 minutes. (Click on a flight in the resulting list, and it gives you neat information about it, such as when it took off, how late that was, a plot of its course, graphs of altitude vs. time, groundspeed vs. time, and heading vs. time).
The second is similar. It figures out that Cepheids are a kind of star, gets a list of the 100 brightest Cepheids, and figures out which are above the horizon at Modesto, CA, right now.
For the third, it decides you are talking about planets (although you can tell it you mean Jupiter, FL and one of the several cities named Mars if you wish), and from their orbital information (which it has in its database) it calculates where they are now, and tells you the distance between them.