What is Wolfram\Alpha?

There are search engines that are coming online to challenge Google's dominance of that market.  One of the ones I ran across from reading latest issue of Business Week (article on Google) and chatting with students in my honors class today -- who of course knew about it with me clueless until today -- Wolfram\Alpha. 

According to its website, Wolfram Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries...is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

I performed a modest comparison with Google by asking a computational question, "How many calories in a cup of tuna?"  What I got from Google was hundreds and hundreds of links to websites that had the search terms in the sentence.  What I got from Wolfrap\Alpha was ONE SINGLE PAGE that gave the caloric information.  The same thing happened when I asked, "How many teaspoons in a tablespoon?"  I got the information specific to the question and that was it.  For those of you out there who teach baking enter in some of your formulas to see the response you get because the students I spoke to in class today love the computational capabilities of this search engine.