There is actually a useful tool inside Wolfram Alpha, which hopefully will be exposed someday. Unfortunately, this would require Stephen Wolfram to amputate what he thinks is the beautiful part of the system, and leave what he thinks is the boring part.


Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces. There’s a ton of gold in this article including the pitfalls of natural language input, the differences between predictable and unpredictable search results, and an insightful take on the “demo illusion” that can blind designer-developers to faults in their own UI.