Wolfram Alpha is coming

It was coming. Every body active on the web was having a gut feeling. Now that Wolfram Alpha has been finally announced, the scene has become so much exciting.

Wolfram Alpha will be(:)) a computational knowledge engine - that's what the simplistic UI says. It is one of those simple input but high output kind of engines that can take in your factual questions and give computational answers. It is not a Google again, not even close to it. It does not return only documents or links to where your keywords appear in the web.It computes answers for a wide range of computational questions like,

1) How many times does the earth rotate in a year?
2) How many 9's are there in the set N: 0 - > (10 to the power 32)
3) If bacteria A reproduces in 30s, what will be the no of bacterial cells in 3 hours time when the first isolated bacteria starts reproducing now.

The above are simple questions that came to my mind while writing this entry, however, one can even ask questions involving calculus.Like Nova Spivack posed some questions( which are given in his blog), - "What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?"

More importantly, it would understand the natural language (- the way humans communicate) that exists on the Web.

And unlike Google, it returns even whatever isn't there on the web.

The powerfulness, effectiveness and more importantly, usefulness of such a thing remains in doubt till Wolfram Alpha goes live in 2-3 months time.However, the time has come to anticipate and look forward to the avenues that WA lays with us.

For me, it may be the next best thing on the Web, apart from Google and Semantic Web.

References:
1) Nova Spivack
2)Wolfram's Blog
3) Wolfram Alpha