Wolfram|alpha

For years Google has ruled the web, so much so that it has even got itself a place in the dictionary as a verb. However its primary limitation was obvious in its description itself: It was a search engine, and its capability was limited to scouring web pages for a particular word or phrase, which would suffice most of the time (provided the person using it was not a dud).

A classic example of a search engine failing to read the user's mind would be to search for "today" in a search engine. Most of it would be riddled with sites containing the word today in their titles or some similar stuff (JFGI and see!). Worse, think of searching for "x.sin(x)" when you want information about the function.. Search engines just falter at this step, simply because it's not what they're built for.

Enter Wolframalpha (admit it: the name, though perhaps oozing with the dire tones of chemistry or Greek alphabets, sounds cool :) Wolframalpha calls itself a "computational knowledge engine. It generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links."
The site sports the quintessential Web 2.0 look, with loads of AJAX(I guess that's what it is) for easy functionality and has a very clean interface that's n00b-proof :) On the right is a handy list of the things one can do with wolframalpha, including a link to their Examples page, where one can do nothing but simply go WOW for a moment looking at all the things one can do (compute) with this beauty! The knowledge search one can do varies from mathematical functions, transportation, education etc, to weather, food and nutrition.

Comparing this with what had been talked about earlier (the 'today' search), it's easy to see the difference: Searching for 'today' displays: Date (in various formats), Observances for the day in the user's country, notable events, moon phase, and so on (oh, and with a 'more' option under each) Pretty exhaustive!

The 'About' section in the site says (hold your breath) "As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including web Mathematica and grid Mathematica."

Wolframalpha gained its popularity immensely in many circles when it was made known on the microblogging site, Twitter. It has come a good distance, and now that we really have really awesome computers to handle and run the kind of a platform this is proving to be, it's sure to grow by leaps and bounds.

Oh, and just think of the possibilities if this became accessible on mobile devices or even watches (psst! during exam-time!)