Wolfram Alpha integration for fact based queries

Recast

Wolfram Alpha is great at answering factual questions about the world or about calculations that are a little too complex for a calculator. Date and time calculations are an area where W|A shines and every general search engine falls flat. For example, https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=mount+everest+height and https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=9+hours+15+minutes+ago are really useful pages on W|A.

Compared to Kagi: No instant answer, but the results do tell me what the height is. (There's also some nice fun trivia but I don't want to read it this time.) https://kagi.com/search?q=mount%20everest%20height

No instant answer and also no search result that answers my question: https://kagi.com/search?q=9+hours+15+minutes+ago

It would be great if Kagi could provide W|A answers when W|A is capable of answering the question. I use the !wa bang frequently, but it would be nice if I didn't have to anticipate that I would need !wa, and Kagi would just give me the answer directly.

Thank you!

Vlad

Recast We have this planned. We love WA as well!

MIB

Vlad

I don't know what kind of plan you have, but it will be great. I just confused because actually WA API is somehow expensive so not sure about if that would be additional burden?

Riptide360

Vlad If you need a fast implementation look at the Wolfram chrome extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wolframalpha-official/icncamkooinmbehmkeilcccmoljfkdhp

Vlad

MIB The trick is to how to recognize what queries are good for WA to answer (not all are obviously). We may make this on demand feature.

Recast

Adding to this, another query from today that Wolfram|Alpha handled EXTREMELY well is "10 metric tons of gold". The reason these results are so good is due to the volume and price conversion. It lets me get a really good feel for what that amount of gold would look like and how it would be treated in the real world.

If this were part of Kagi I would expect to see both conversions in the results page.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10+metric+tons+of+gold

Vlad

Main challenge with WA is latency (it can take 1-2 s for response). So this would need to be on demand in the UI somehow which could hinder utility. Thoughts?

Recast

Nice work in today's update! If I could suggest a couple of improvements from what I've seen so far:

"10 metric tons of gold" responds with "= 0.01 metric kilotons", which isn't an interesting conversion. I would have preferred to see some of the other conversions that W|A offers, like volume, sphere radius, side of a cube, and price.
"days left in the year", a time-based query, currently does not trigger the widget on Kagi.

Vlad

Recast

We have no control over what WA returns, and this is what it choses to 🙂
This sould be fixable