Wolfram Alpha is AWESOME

[Sharky]

Re: Wolfram Alpha is pretty neat.

Having used it a bit more, I guess its not quite awesome, not even lower-case awesome, much less in caps.

I still think it's awesome. They made a very nice first-cut effort at merging Mathematica with a bunch of public databases and some simple semi-natural language queries. Of course based on the level of effort they appear to have put into it -- "less than 100 people" for the last 4 years and 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code and many terabytes of data -- it certainly should be impressive.

However, I think calling it a "computational knowledge engine" is definitely a misnomer. The software queries and displays data and information -- not knowledge.