We’re all familiar with search engines, such as Google, but I think we are all ready for something different…an answer engine! What’s the difference? A search engine as we know it, allows us to ask it for something, and the result is a list of pages that give us information regarding the search. With search engines, you must then go into the pages and find the information you are looking for.
Wolfram Alpha was created by Stephen Wolfram, and is designed to be used just as much as Google, but in a different way. With Wolfram Alpha, you ask a specific question and it will not bring up hundreds of pages containing the words you are searching for, but rather….the answer to the question. It is less about finding information and more about computing the answers. The site is expected to launch in May 2009, and there is much buzz that this might be as big as Google eventually. You can read more about the site here.