[fferen]

Wolfram Alpha also seems to bail out when a mathematical expression exceeds a certain complexity, which makes it fairly useless for the only thing I want to use it for - evaluating hairy integrals and other long expressions. Or worse, it just "interprets" it as a part of my original expression and calculates that, as if I just typed out the rest of it because I enjoy typing random symbols. It seems like such a waste to fire up Mathematica every time but I haven't found any comparable online tools.

I think W|A could have been a great tool for this kind of thing but instead it tried to cover every subject instead of doing one thing well.

[troyastorino]

If you just type in the expression as Mathematica code, doesn't Wolfram Alpha evaluate it just as Mathematica would?

[JoachimSchipper]

Yes, but it times out rather quickly. Mathematica is much more powerful.

(For those interested: the relevant syntax is

    Integrate[x^2, x]

or

    Integrate[x^2, {x, 0, 1}]

You can find more Mathematica at http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Mathematica.h...; searching the Mathematica docs is often easier than figuring out which textual query Wolfram|Alpha understands.)

[lemen]

No not always. I've tried several times, but W|A pipes the input first trough the natural language processor. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=DateListPlot[++WeatherD...]