Wolfram Alpha is finally on line

The project of the Wolfram Research, a computational knowledge engine known as Wolfram Alpha finally became available to the bigger circle of interested users.

If you're interested in trying out the new knowledge engine, you can try this ambitious project at Wolfram Alpha's official pages. To make the matters clear, this is not an internet search engine such as Google, Ask.Com or Yahoo. Wolfram Alpha is a knowledge base, planned to  expand as the time goes by. So far, the knowledge engine features a lot of scientific, mathematical, economical information and is expanding as its own searching algorithms analyze the questions put by users and crawl for the answers themselves. What makes this project interesting is the mix between in-house data and search engine capabilities. Unlike the conventional search engines that use their vast databases for snapshots of websites the bots crawled on, Wolfram Alpha stores a large number of answers in its own form, and then supplementing that information with the external links such as Wikipedia, Google and the like.

The heart of this project is a supercomputer capable for performing the vast number of queries, and right syntax users can check on the same pages. As Wolfram Alpha is a really big research project and is only in its early stages of development - the breakups and somewhat difficult access depending on the load can be expected.

Still, if the algorithms for the engine turn out to be right on the target, this might become a very interesting alternative for searching answers on questions, instead of typing the key words.