[fao_]

Not really. Try asking it "how long does water take to freeze 300m above sea level" or "how much time does water take to freeze when 300m above sea level"

It's a simple enough question -- it's able to show me a gradient curve when i give it "water freeze", but it's not able to parse that data into a simple format, which is the entire point of using a search engine like that.

It's been the same for a number of simple queries lately. Just absolutely useless.

[mikewarot]

Water only freezes when it is cold, it isn't time dependent.

[fao_]

The time it takes to become cold enough to freeze is pressure-dependent. "Room temperature" can be assumed in the case, or hell, I could have told it it was 21°C. I only wanted a ballpark figure to base a rough plan around ("This will take around this long, so I have this much time before I can do X"), which was certainly within the power of Wolfram Alpha to give me.

The point that this example is trying to illustrate is that Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine ("Find this out for me"), it is a definition engine ("Given these definitions, what is X"), and while it advertises itself as the former with the examples given, doesn't especially succeed at it to any specific degree.