Where is the Puck?

Remember recommendation / discovery engines described earlier on this blog? Well, here is another alternative to the world of Google and search engines: it is called a computational knowledge engine. www.wolframalpha.com is designed for you to ask it a question and get a factually correct answer, along with a visual interpretation of that answer. Alpha isn’t an attempt to catalog the world’s information. It is NOT a search engine, which means that if you want to find pictures of celebrities, the cheapest flights or articles about any particular topic, you need to use a search engine. On the other hand, if you enter the name of any particular city, you will get city related data such as population, area, current weather, map and notable people born in the city. Alpha’s ultimate goal is to be capable of answering questions written in natural language!