Wolfram | Alpha
I remember reading about this a long time ago and only just saw that it has gone live:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
The idea is that you ask a question, and unlike Google where you are (usually) presented with a list of potentially relevant resources, you are given an answer. It still doesn’t understand a lot of things but presumably will improve over time. However, as far as ‘ask engines’ go, Wolfram is very promising and powerful.
As a test one of the first questions I asked was “how many employees does telus have?”, here’s the Google response:
Now the Wolfram response (pretty impressive!)
Tags: Google, Wolfram Alpha