Wolfram Alpha continued

| brunocm, on May 29th, 2009

So what do you get when you put ‘What is the ratio of GDP for the US and Japan for the last 20 years?’ into Wolfram Alpha?  (see 5/5 post)

A quick note about the layout of the, um, SERP.  It works for me, but I’d like to use WA more before making a judgement. From what I have seen the resutls page in clean, crisp, the font is large and the data I have seen is layed out intuitively.  They all seem to start with an ‘input interpretation’ section to be clear on how the engine interpreted your request, followed by different sections of results including data, charts, maps, diagrams, mathematical equations.

So back to my original query – the engine needs help disambiguating it, and although it catches important terms and in some cases relationships, it doesn’t quite provide you with the right alternative.  This is what WA suggests:

“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

1. “ratio of GDP for US” - and if you could tell me what’s going on there I would appreciate it.  This query is interpreted as an F distribution, and I won’t even try to interpret what its doing just yet. This result does remind you that Wolfram Mathemica provides a lot of juice to WA.

The next 4 alternatives were categorized under ‘Countries’.  You start to understand as you see some of these that there is a certain syntax that works well with the engine for country related queries (and all others, for that matter)

2. “GDP Brasil + US” Notice nothing about ‘ratio’ is captured in that query, and it provides the combined GDP for the 2 countries, and it also provides a long term trended chart (over 20 years of data, which you get regardless of whether you include ‘for 2o years’ in the original query)

3. “Brasil, US” (same as “Brasil US”) Nothing about ratio, but a lot of country related data aligned in 2 columns for easy comparison.  If I scroll down I can calculate the ratio of GDP from the data provided.

The other alternatives under ‘Countries’ are similar and not helpful.

The last alternative (#7)  picks up the statistical concept of a ‘ratio distribution’ and provides quite a bit of mathematical data, again thanks to Mathematica.

So after all this, “GDP Brasil, US” (same as “GDP Brasil  US”) is not provided as an alternative.  It was the only query that provides you with the data to calculate the ratio of GDP of the 2 countries for 20 years.  Still, this would be a bit tedious as you would have to interpolate the values on the chart provided before doing the calculation.

I guess a bit disappointing.  Did I miss the obvious here? But despite this simple example, there are a lot of cool things one can do with WA. The engine definitely has a preferred syntax, so you gotta spend time with it and learn to massage your queries.  It would have been nice to have when I was an engineering student.  But certainly the information it has about statistical concepts should be helpful.  A great reference tool for sure, great math engine, probably.  Not a Google killer and not meant to be, however, it should stir things up in the industry.  This could be one of the most interesting battles we’ve seen between Ph.d’s since the Cold War. 

Oh, so where does ratio GDP Brasil US get you?  It gives you alternative GDP Brasil  US which is not provided when you type the query in regular language, but still not the right answer, directly.