I was trying today to search a tool or something that calculates the shortest distance between two points on Earth.
My first thought was to google for it (as usual), but since there was some noise a while ago about Wolfram|Alpha I jump there for a search.
I’ve typed in: shortest path between two points on a sphere
and I got “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” and Wolfram|Alpha sent me to the mathematical model of the Sphere.
Then I googled the same phrase
First hit sends me to a Mathematica applet (a product of Wolfram). So, google knows much more about Wolfram that Wolfram itself.
The second link was an interactive web based Google Map, very easy to use wich gave me the exact response I’ve searched.
I know that Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine and is maybe in Alpha state, but if it fails giving me responses on basic geometry questions then what the hell it is?
Hype?!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics
Thanks for the info ktx…
I was checking Geodesic on Wolfram|Alpha and again it failed.
hahahah funny because it works with a lowercase G :))
the wolfram|alpha programmers were either lazy ;)) either very strict about the inputs!