Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha will be a new search engine that is supposed to be "a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does." So if you ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Or if you want to find out what the weather was like in Sao Tome when President Nixon gave the Checkers speech, it will cross-check and provide the answer.

This is not a wiki, however. It is vetted by experts first and will probably need about 1,000 people to regularly update its databases. Mind you, these are all geeks, so the pop culture questions we'll be putting into the search engine will confuse the software, which is a major weakness thus far.

Wolfram Alpha was created by Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the guy whose software (Mathematica) we higher math nerds love because we can just type in the equations and get the answers right before the homework is due. Dr. Wolfram is 49 years old and got his PhD in particle physics by the age of 20, so the guy is clearly smart. I don't know if his new invention will take over titans like Google and Wikipedia, though. At least not instantly. Once he completes all the pop culture stuff, possibly by teaming up with one or both of the aforementioned entities, then Wolfram Alpha will be the next Kobe Bryant of the internet. It's already being hailed as something like a LeBron James, even before making its debut (set to be later this month).

Anyway, I'm tired of googling something to death (try Ratchet of Progress, you won't find it) and still not being able to get something that's damn near uncrawlable. So this is a welcome change.