Wolfram|Alpha (also written WolframAlpha and Wolfram Alpha) is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.[3] It was announced in March 2009 by British businessman Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.
Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram|Alpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.
With Mathematica running in the background, it is suited to answer mathematical questions. The answer usually transcends the pure statement of a result, by showing a human readable solution.
Some links on the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wo ... to-be-big/
I tried WolframAlpha and surprisingly or not it works quickly and very diferently from a standard "Google-like" search engine - you can ask a meaningful question and expect meaningful answer in one click. There is what to improve of course but surely this is a big step towards the future of Web
