Wolfram Alpha

[hooligan]

So, has anybody else tried it yet?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/ - rather intriguing.

It's very different from the usual search engine paradigm, instead you can ask questions, enter formulae etc.

For some reason though, the page renders extremely slowly on firefox 3 here at work (fedora 10)

Rather useless, I'd say. 99% of times Google is more of your friend, and usually it doesn't give answers to trivial questions. Thumbs down.

[hooligan]

People seem to be completely unable to grasp that this isn't a search engine. It's a computable knowledge engine. They are completely and utterly different.

If the system has a downfall it will primarily be due to this, I suspect.

I know whats it for. Tested it already yesterday and quite a lot today. Still it doesnt give any answers to many trivial questions, while google does. Conclusion, a) it simply doesnt work b) has too little data to be of any use