Wolfram Alpha Struggling to Find an Audience

Wolfram Alpha

Link to May 18 cnet news post, "Wolfram Alpha's niche continues to elude".

Excerpt: One year after its debut, the world is still not ready for Wolfram Alpha.

Few would argue that despite the success of Google, Internet search is a solved problem. The way that content is being shared across it is evolving so quickly means that better ways of discovering and presenting that content will always be welcome.

Wolfram Alpha certainly provides a different way to think about Internet search. It's heavily weighted toward computational queries, and its practice of curating its results as opposed to simply serving up whatever is available on the Web means its results can be more authoritative than a list of links.

But that strategy--useful as it might be to researchers and technical types--hasn't resonated with the general public. ComScore's assessment of unique users to wolframalpha.com over the past year shows that fewer people visited the site in April 2010 than did in May 2009. That traffic last year was undoubtedly juiced by curiosity and media attention, and usage has risen since a trough in late summer 2009, but as a search provider Wolfram Alpha doesn't even register on ComScore's radar.

Let's take a closer look.

Just under the search bar, you'll find a "New to Wolfram Alpha" link, which offers you "a few things to try".

Like a specific date.  Retiring Guy typed in his birth date.

Retiring Guy then typed in his city of birth.

Auburn, Washington, located between Seattle and Tacoma, was a much smaller city in 1950.  How much smaller?

For the most part, Wolfram Alpha's historical population data uses the 2000 census as a starting point.  Line graphs for the years 1900-2000 were found for Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane, Washington State's 3 largest cities.

Wikipedia to the rescue.  Auburn is a post-WWII boomtown that continues to grow at an accelerated pace.

The opening paragraph of the Auburn entry, however, offers a different figure, though one that is explained and footnoted.  [T]he State of Washington Office of Financial Management[4] estimates the City of Auburn's population to be 67,485 as of April 1, 2008[5]. The population increased dramatically resulting from the recent annexations[6] of the West Hill, and Lea Hill, Washington communities directly east and west of the city.[7]

Related article:
Googling myself.  (4/10/2008)