0With all the various discussion and playing around with Wolfram|Alpha, I decided it was time for me to see what it's about. The takeaway is to go through all the examples carefully to discover what it does and does not do. It is not a Google-killer. It is not all hype. It is not HAL. It will not pass the Turing test. It will not make your children eat their brussels sprouts. It has some good Easter eggs in it.

0I'd quibble with them philosophically for calling it a knowledge engine. It's data, not knowledge that they're working with, and data from -- no surprise -- very science-oriented domains. For example, it's not going to help with computations on the number of words in Hamlet compared to King Lear, nor with word frequency comparisons, though it can do some nifty other word fun. (Crossword-puzzlers: it will find words matching a pattern of blanks!)

0What it does with the data can be pretty neat, though. I love having an online calendar computer for historical dates. This is a helpful and handy research tool in many disciplines. It does nice things with calculating things like fuel economy and vehicle stopping distances. It does a rough calculation of blood-alcohol content. It will calculate the local gravity for a spot on earth. It has loads and loads of socioeconomic and census data. I really liked what it can do with musical info, like producing chords, showing the keyboard layout, and playing the sound.

0There is a lot of cool stuff with age of the universe calculations, relativistic physics computations, quantum mechanics info, chemistry info, and materials science info. There are nice calculations for things like body mass index, calories burned during various exercises for different lengths of time, drug interactions, glucose levels, and more.

0The thing to remember is that this is data-centric, and counts on calculations. If you have a question that comes down to needing specific data and/or calculations, then that's what Wolfram|Alpha is good at. The less your question calls for a data-centric answer, the less useful it will be, and you're likely better off heading to Yahoo! or Google or Wikipedia.