Wolfram Alpha – Better late than never
Although problems of many kinds caused the live launch of the Wolfram Alpha search engine to be very late, the service eventually got more or less online last night from Champaign, Illinois.
It seems like everything that could go wrong did. There was a tornado watch in the launch center in Champaign, the database was balky, and everything about the network and communications system went awry. Even the television service Wolfram tried to use to explain the delays went down so that he was unable to explain the difficulties to all of those who were watching, while visitors in the chat room, showing massive immaturity, heckled from the sidelines.
Finally, after a half-hour of no communication capabilities at all, Stephen Wolfram was able to get an open video circuit and explain the problems, although network engineers competed with him on the audio circuit, making it almost impossible to understand what he was saying. As he tried to explain, very loud thunder could easily be heard in the background, according to a CNET story. In the end, the delay proved to be virtually permanent, as Wolfram lowered expectations from a world-wide live launch to to a test launch, with a public launch scheduled now for Monday. The only available access was through a back-door URL published by Wolfram in the chat room and on Twitter.
The system has been up and down since the failed launch. A test during the writing of this column showed that the system was up, although it never returned answers to some very specific objective queries. On the fifth test query, the search engine simply stated that it had exceeded its test capacity. It is possible that means that Alpha is not working properly quite yet.
Nothing about the launch broadcast or the launch itself seemed even vaguely professional, and was certainly not polished. This is not the sort of start that Wolfram was hoping for, and certainly does not make him or his company look good. The debacle that was Wolfram Alpha Friday is going to be difficult to overcome, even if things go off well when they try the launch process again.
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