Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might .It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.
Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. Fig.1.1
1.1 Computational knowledge engine:
Traditional search engines crawl the Web for sites and add them to their directories. Algorithms built into the code that powers these search engines rank pages higher or lower based on several factors. One is the number of people who click on the link from the search engine results page (SERP). Another is the number of third-party Web sites that link to that site. If you create a public Web site, there's a decent chance it'll end up on a search engine without your having to do a thing to get it listed - as long as there are links to it from other sites. Alpha is a massive project that will never be finished. Scientific and mathematical problems are easy for Alpha to handle. In fact, you can ask the computational knowledge engine to derive a calculus problem and not only will it tell you the answer, it will also show you what steps are required to solve it.
Results can be quite simple: To get that information, a person types a query into the search box on the Wolfram|Alpha home page and presses the equals sign to the right -- the equals sign is a clue that there's math going on in the background. Alpha then looks searches for corresponding data in its