[bpodgursky]

I think it's important to note that many queries on Wolfram Alpha are VERY heavyweight--I've had complex calculations and rendering take 30 seconds to a minute to finish. It's not like Google where a query get a result in a few milliseconds. So while Terminology is not likely to be querying it with lots of formulas, I think the policy exists so a badly thought out automated querier can't accidentally put a huge load on Wolfram's engine.

[steveklabnik]

There's an easy technical solution to this: just block the freaking querier.

Also, if they didn't render a result as an image, maybe it wouldn't take so freaking long...

[malnourish]

Now, I am probably wrong but am asking this due to curiosity. Could they conceivably use HTML5 to render dynamically thus reducing resource/load cost?

Edit: No to Now

[steveklabnik]

I hope they don't try to sue me for this post.

    http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+%2B+5

(oh noes!) gives an image containing '7'. They could just freaking put a 7.

Granted, not all of their queries could be done this way, and some of those could indeed be done with canvas, for example. Dunno if those would be faster. But all of the numbers and tables could stand to just be numbers and tables.

This is more of a gripe about copy/paste than performance, really: I'd imagine their calculations take a lot longer than making a .png

[malnourish]

Makes sense.

What if they output in LaTeX for more complex things, and there was a LaTeX plugin for browsers?

[27182818284]

I've seen Chrome plugins and I know there are Greasemonkey scripts for automatically LaTeXing plain text on web pages.

I don't think this is a viable solution for W|A, however.

[imrehg]

MathJax for the win :)

[yesimahuman]

Maybe it's a guard against common scraping?

[ars]

The rendering is not the hard part - the mathematical calculation is.

[troels]

I really don't think that is the case.

[troels]

Just to qualify that, since apparently it wasn't clear. If their site is that prone to dos'ing, they would probably use something other than a tos to protect it with.