WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine created by Stephen Wolfram

It basically generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base (composed of many trillions of elements), instead of searching the web and returning links. 

I spent some time testing it and I gotta say it is awesome. So, no it isn’t gonna replace Google, it is for a different usage.

It is very usefull when you want to find answers to a particular question, for instance, if you look for earthquake in indonesia, you will get this as a result.

I really like the way the information is reported / outputed to the end user. If you try with “barcelona montreal”, it will even display the result in a table and compare the results.

I took some time to read a little bio about Stephen Wolfram and well, it is pretty impressive. Here is a short summary of what we can read about him on Wikipedia.

Who is Stephen Wolfram ?

Stephen Wolfram (born  in 1959) is a British physicist, mathematician,author and businessman, known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cosmology, cellular automata, complexity theory, and computer algebra.

Wolfram is considered as a child prodigy, he published an article on particle physics at age 16 and entered Oxford University at age 17. He received his Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20. He developed the famous software Mathematica.

(Source : Wikipedia) 

Have fun and try that very nice tool, this is defintely going in my bookmarks folder: WolframAlpha.com