WolframAlpha: providing too little user feedback?

I have some fun event processing code examples in store (a hidden Markov model and some on-line categorization and partitioning algorithms written in streaming SQL). But I’ve been busy, so instead I’m giving my two cents on WolframAlpha.

Here is my big problem with WolframAlpha: you don’t know what features it has, so you have to guess. The result is that you waste so much time that you get bored.

For example, the site will give me answers for “5 largest countries by area” or “5 largest countries by number of people” or “5 largest countries by GDP” but not “5 largest countries by number of sheep” or “5 largest countries by export of wheat”.

And it gives me no idea of why. Is it because it does not know how many sheep are in every country (or about wheat exports)? Or because it is hard-coded to understand how to rank countries by only a few terms and I am wasting my time by asking it for anything else? I get the impression that it is the latter, which would make this thing much less revolutionary than we have been told.

If only it would give me some feedback, I would know. Maybe it could tell me how it knows to rank countries. Or how it parsed my query, rather than just a generic “dunno what you want” message.

Similarly, it gives no answer for “median population of 10 largest countries”. So why not? It knows population (since it will rank countries by population), it knows how to calculate a median… what’s wrong? Am I phrasing the question wrong? Does it simply have hard coded functions like “rank countries” and “calculate median of input numbers” but will not chain the median function to the data on population of countries? Again, am I wasting my time by trying queries like this?

I’m getting the feeling that the system has some built in functions to operate over its data store (rank countries, compare cities) and it just tries to match your query up to one of these abilities. In this case, all the “cool examples” that are provided on the site are not “examples” at all, they are a list of everything the site can do. This is very frustrating because Wolfram is giving the impression that I should experiment with all kinds of queries and see what I get.

All in all, I wish it would give me more feedback so I can understand whether it fails to answer my queries because I am phrasing them wrong, because it is missing data, or because it has a limited set of features and I am just wasting my time.