The arrow of time

Here's a few things I tried on Wolfram Alpha and Google, and the first results they responded with:

• "Where do Kangaroos Live?" WA: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.", Google: "Where do Kangaroos Live; Kangaroos are marsupials found nearly exclusively in Australia, with some living in parts of Papua New Guinea. They live in a variety of different climates. wanttoknowit.com/where-do-kangaroos-live/"
• "Where is Trnje?" WA: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.", Google: "Trnje: Votes for Kljenak, Rozic - More to Bandic - Croatia - Javno 6 May 2009 ... Bandic is leading in Zagreb's suburb Trnje, followed by Kregar and Mesic. 19 people do not know who to vote for.
  www.javno.com/en-croatia/trnje--votes-for-kljenak-rozic---more-to-bandic_256033"

Of course, Alpha isn't a search engine - it's supposed to parse your query and really calculate the answer instead of doing pattern matching over petabytes of data. So here are some more queries:

• "speed of light in alcohol" WA: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.", Google: "Optical Density and Light Speed This value is the speed of light in a vacuum. ... Like any wave, the speed of a light wave is dependent upon the properties of the medium. ... www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/class/refrn/u14l1d.html" - the answer to this wasn't in Google summary blurb but it really is contained on the page.
• "orbital escape velocity of mars" WA: 5020 m/s Google: "Mars — Escape Velocity: 5.027 km/s
  According to http://www.eightplanetsfacts.com/mars.php" - hmm, first actual result  I got from WA. Google has it also.
• "who was nero's wife?" WA: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.", Google: "About Poppaea Sabina A profile of Poppaea, mistress and wife of Roman emperor Nero and subject of a ... The opera focuses on the replacement of Nero's wife Octavia by Poppaea. ... womenshistory.about.com/cs/romanempire/p/p_poppaea.htm"
• "when did albert einstein die?" WA: 1955-04-18, Google: "WikiAnswers - When and where was Albert Einstein born and when did ... When and where was Albert Einstein born ans when did he die? ... When did albert enistien born and die? When was Albert Einstein born and dead? ... wiki.answers.com/Q/When_and_where_was_Albert_Einstein_born_and_when_did_he_die" - again, not in the summary but about here somewhere.
• "is digitalis poisonous?" WA: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." Google: "Digitalis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The best-known species is the Common Foxglove, Digitalis purpurea. It is a biennial, .... [edit] See also. List of plants poisonous to equines ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalis" - the summary only has worth for horses but obviously this page has the answer (in short - yes).
  
• "sqrt(2)" WA: [insert here everything Mathematica knows about the square root of 2] Google: "sqrt(2) = 1.41421356 More about calculator."
• "weight of Eiffel tower on Pluto" WA: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." Google: "WikiAnswers - What is the total weight of the Eiffel Tower Paris Travel question: What is the total weight of the Eiffel Tower? it is 10000 tons. wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_total_weight_of_the_Eiffel_Tower" - it's not on Pluto and it's dubiously weight but it's close.
• "fourier analysis of sine function" WA: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." Google: "Fourier Transform--Sine -- from Wolfram MathWorld F_x[sin(2pik_0x)](k), = int_(-infty)^inftye^(-2piikx)((e^ ... is the delta function. SEE ALSO: Fourier Transform, Fourier Transform--Cosine, Sine ... mathworld.wolfram.com/FourierTransformSine.html " - Interestingly, Google returned a result from Wolfram MathWorld, Wolfram's encyclopedia of mathematics.
  

Here are some queries that were suggested to me by other people:

• "Wind power in Spain" WA: "21.23 billion killowatt hours per year" Google: "Wind power in Spain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The largest producer of wind power in Spain is Iberdrola, with 27 percent of capacity, followed by Acciona on 16 percent and Endesa with 10 percent ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Spain". Alpha's result was surprisingly informative here - the result contained not only the numeric result but was followed up by a graph of electric power history (unclear whether it's total or wind-power only), conversions and comparisons. Google suggested Wikipedia's article which probably contains as much information but in a much less condensed form.
• "CO2 emissions in Spain" WA: "368.3 tCO2e/year" Google: "World Environment News - Spain's CO2 Emissions Fell in 2006 ... 19 Apr 2007 ... MADRID - Spain's emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas, fell by 4.1 percent in 2006 compared with 2005, reversing years ... www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/41462/story.htm" Again, Alpha offers a much more concise and to-the-point answer, supplemented by historic and comparative data,  while Google wanders off on a tangent. 

My final thoughs are nonconclusive. I'd actually like the idea of Alpha to work out, to be a highly usable, almost intelligent parser of data that draws its answers from solid, well known encyclopedic sources. It may be that one day but today it's not much more than a toy.

The queries on which it returns relevant and well structured answers are rare. It looks to me like it s internally built around a concept of categories for which a human designed its templates for output results. If, for example, the phrase "CO2 emissions" is replaced with "chlorine emissions", "gold emission" or "money emission"  it gets stuck. I guess the topics such as "birth/death dates of famous people", "general data on planets and stellar bodies", "scientific constants" and "environmental data" were deemed to be of high prority and were thus inserted in to the engine sooner. This suggest that the amount of "innovative" data mining or some kind of automatic intelligent corellation in Alpha is fairly low.

Update: I found some interesting classes of queries that work:

• Searching cities. To find out what's the time and temperature in my current town, enter Zagreb in WA.
• Calculations on collected data. To see what is the ratio of populations of Zagreb and Hamburg,  enter "population Zagreb/Hamburg", and enter "euro/usd" to see a graph of relative value of Euro and US dolar and "co2 emissions Europe/USA" to see the ratio of CO2 emissions. On the other hand, entering "sin(euro/usd)" doesn't work (not that I'd expect it to :) ).
  
• Incredibly, sarching gene sequences works. Given "ATTCTTTAATCGTC", WA will recognize it as a base paair sequence, analyze it and search the sequence within human genome.