Wolfram Alpha: A Search Engine that Does More than Search

Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, which developed Twine says Wolfram Alpha may be as "important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose." He says "Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database." "In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google.

Here's a link to an article that compares the IBM Watson approach to the Wolfram Alpha approach:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2011/01/jeopardy-ibm-and-wolframalpha/