Modern search engines have come a long way, but there’s always more progress that can be made. For the past few years we’ve been able to get relevant results that help us to find what we’re looking for, but for the most part, search engines just dump this information on your screen and expect you to make sense of it. With so much data and advanced algorithms out there, the time has come for our searches to become more meaningful. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a computational knowledge engine, and once you spend some time with it, you’ll see why.

In many ways, this is the future of search. You can treat it like a regular search engine, however, it’s much more than that. The engine adds meaning to your searches in a variety of ways. Instead of linking you to pages of results, Wolfram|Alpha makes sense of what you’re asking and displays the answer in a unique and multifaceted way. You really must try it to see what I’m talking about. A series of sample inputs are suggested on the site, so find a topic you like and see what you can come up with.