Beyond Google?

Wolfram Alpha, the invention of Dr Stephen Wolfram, has been demo'd at Harvard and had the Twitterspher atwitter for days. In this ten minute video, you can get a sense of what makes it different and more useful than Google. It's hard to see the screen and results, but the audio alone makes it clear that Wolfram Alpha is a different way of searching the Internet. Here's more information from The Independent.

The Independent says, "Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts...If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out."

It's to be released sometime this month.