HN Explorer

15 comments

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omarchowdhury
Okay everyone start submitting every little problem with Wolfram Alpha now!
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axod
That's exactly what happens when you do the "massive hype big televised launch" strategy.

If cuil had gone for the "Slowly grow organically, iterate, improve", it may well be grabbing market share by now, instead of being dead.

doctor
No it's not, median is a kind of average (the most common one).
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buugs
I wonder if mean gets the same results however.
ComputerGuru
People need to realize WA isn't some generic search engine, it's an academic one.... and must be used as such.

Median and Mean are both "average." You get what you search for.

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systemtrigger
I haven't read the documentation on how to speak to W|A but I think "average age at death..." would have been clearer form symantically.
noelchurchill
First of all, the question doesn't mean anything. If you read it literally it's asking "how old is death on average in the united states in 2005?" How old is death? Next query should be "where is the nearest college level logic and critical thinking course?"
axod
If people need to take a course on logic to use it, I don't think it'll be that useful.
tokenadult
But maybe natural language queries will always work better if they are grammatical, because ungrammatical queries will have too many ambiguities to parse.
zackattack
Exactly. If a human couldn't answer the question, how could a computer parse it?
pj
it clearly says,"no data available"

If it had the average age, or the mean age, then it would have given it to you.