Wolfram Alpha - Diversity in the Search Engine world?

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine, the primary use of which is research. You type your question in, it analyzes it, and gives you an answer. What I think is the most impressive thing about Wolfram Alpha is that it works on older browsers, recognizes questions incredibly well, and has lots of info to give. Some of the most awesome things you can do with Wolfram Alpha are looking up dates, math of all sorts, geographic locations, and other things of the sort.

It's a source of information far more relevant in some instances than Google, Bing, or any of the older conventional search engines. That's not to say it stands a chance of  dethroning any of the other search engines from their respective thrones (or lack there-of). The new search engine doesn't really help you find websites, and it's image search capability is highly limited. It specializes in providing data, and while it does an incredibly impressive job if this it definitely doesn't have what it takes to be the search engine.

One thought however is that it could replace Google in things like schools, where Google can sometimes be abused to search for things irrelevant to the student's education. It could also earn it's own seat on the Search Engine scene, and though it will have difficulty dominating it, it can certainly hope to stand side by side with other search engines as being useful and advantageous to use regardless of whether you use other search engines.

I think that Wolfram Alpha has certainly earned it's place in fame, and that schools should take advantage of it's relevant, data-focused interface. A student can't find, say, video games on Wolfram Alpha. It can't find internet forums or chatrooms. It only handles data, and images directly relevant to the data searched for, such as graphs or maps.

Give Wolfram Alpha a try for yourself at http://www.wolframalpha.com/. Try searching your birth date, or finding a complex math formula for the site to evaluate. Even browsers as old as Internet Explorer 6 can handle the site, though just barely, and you will get a warning.