Daily Archive

I wrote about the new search engine Wolfram|Alpha shortly after it debuted this spring, and concluded that whatever its strengths in mathematics and the hard sciences, it was pretty much useless as a tool for scholars of higher education. As I wrote at the time, “it has no idea what college enrollment or tuition is, and can’t tell me anything about trends in those arenas. It doesn’t know that Howard University is a HBCU, or even what proportion of Howard’s student body is black.”

The team behind W|A say they’ve been working on expanding its “knowledge domains” this summer, so I took it out for another spin this morning, re-running all the searches I ran last spring. Unfortunately, it did no better with any of them this time around.

If and when Wolfram|Alpha expands into social science and demographic research, it may well be something spectacular. But that day is apparently still pretty far off.