Wolfram Alpha

After months of hearing about Wolfram|Alpha from the usual sources, I thought it might be interesting; instead of a normal search engine, it's supposed to assemble data and put it together for you in a cohesive manner. For example, if you enter "Long Island, NY" you get a map of the United States, a little red dot indicating where Long Island is, the population, and the area.

That's all well and good, I guess. But this isn't anything more than Wikipedia already does (with varying degrees of accuracy.) It does a few other neat things involving mathematical formulas and such, but I can't seem to convince the damn thing to do much that's actually useful. Even as a web site, it's damaged to begin with; you can't run a query without javascript turned on. It's one thing to enhance your page with the language, it's another to require it to function. As it stands, this is pretty brain-damaged web design.

But, when it comes to actually doing anything, Wolfram|Alpha is fairly useless. I've found that all queries fall into four categories:

1. Trivial: Something you could have just as easily gotten from another source or that you just threw in there to see what would happen.
   
2. Bad Input: Queries that aren't trivial are often too complicated for the site to parse, leading to the site asking you for something simpler.
   
3. Too hard: When you actually make a request that's simple enough to be understood, but detailed enough to be useful, the site complains that it can't handle the request because of limitations of the server. Awesome.
   
4. Jokes: A subset of "trivial" queries. You'll be pleased to know that asking it for the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. You may also note that I was able to tell you this on a static page with no amazing software behind it.
   

If their ability to parse requests improves and the server capacity issues die down after people find it useless, it might become a useful tool. Right now though, it seems like a bad punchline to a poor joke.