Dear Wolfram Alpha,
Every so often I decide that I’ve found a query that Wolfram Alpha might actually be able to answer, and every time it fails. Tonight it was “What movies have both Mae Whitman and Michael Cera?” (Yes, I tried lots of terse and not-so-terse forms of the question.) Fortunately I found the IMDB page which supports this particular type of query. Here’s the answer.
I wonder if a more “exploratory” interface might be useful. For example, I start by querying for one actor, and with the basic results I get a list of related queries that I could try, one of which is “What movies has Michael Cera acted in?” (or equivalent). The resulting list of movies is accompanied by a list of suggestions for narrowing the list, one of which is “starring ?” (in addition to “directed by ?” and such).
With each refinement of the results the interface could update the query to reflect the new parameters so users could learn to write the “magic bullet” queries that will yield these advanced results.
I hope you’re way ahead of me on this.
-Michael
