By Tom Krazit, 18 May 2009 11:17
NEWS
Wolfram Alpha struggled to get up and rolling on Friday evening under difficult conditions.
The new search engine attempted to make its debut literally in the middle of the perfect storm: a tornado watch had engineers on edge in Champaign, Illinois, US, where Wolfram Research attempted to bring the service online. However, networking and database problems also prevented the engine from launching as of 18:00(PDT), an hour after the company said it would go live to the world.
Uplink problems with the Justin.tv service prevented Wolfram from explaining exactly what was going on for nearly half an hour. Eventually, around 17:30(PDT), Wolfram founder Stephen Wolfram appeared on camera to explain that glitches were holding up the launch.
After initially claiming the service would go live Friday evening, Wolfram lowered expectations by only promising a test launch over the weekend, with full service expected by today.
Wolfram Research was forced to show videos showing off the datacentre servers and power-redundancy systems taped earlier in the day while Stephen Wolfram convened an emergency meeting to figure out what was going on. The broadcast was somewhat less-than-polished, with audio engineers talking over Wolfram's initial address to the audience and rendering much of his speech incoherent.
Wolfram Alpha is now up and running and seems to be working just fine. A spokesman for Wolfram Research spoke to silicon.com sister site CNET News.com at 19:30(PDT) to say it was about to launch.
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