Last Straw

Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine you’re likely to hear a lot more about and it went live with a test run today. It’s not a search engine in the same way as Google, which indexes and searches web­sites, but an answer search engine, which indexes and com­putes facts.

Wolfram Alpha about page:

Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambi­tious, long-term pro­ject to make all sys­tem­atic know­ledge imme­di­ately com­put­able by any­one.  You enter your ques­tion or cal­cu­la­tion, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and grow­ing col­lec­tion of data to com­pute the answer.  Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing.

Theodore Gray of Wolfram Research describes the secret behind Wolfram Alpha:

The secret weapon that has allowed us, and no one else, to assemble such a vast lib­rary of algorithms, in such a diverse range of fields, is Math­em­at­ica.

Math­em­at­ica is famil­iar to sci­ent­ists and engin­eers as the most power­ful, most gen­eral tool for sci­entific com­pu­ta­tion, a role it has played since Ver­sion 1 was released in 1988.