Wolfram Alpha is a search engine – or more accurately - an answer engine (www.wolframalpha.com) that is a "must have" for all hard-core geeks.

The Wolfram Alpha website lets you search in natural language and makes basic assumptions about your search and returns the appropriate information. The information that the website returns can take the form of text, charts, and photos. If it can't understand what you are searching for, it will show the "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input" error message.

I think it is worth noting that Wolfram Alpha does not operate the same as Google or any other spider-based search engine. The search results are not harvested from existing websites but are instead created in real time in response to your query.

For example, a search for "the sun" does not return a list of websites that have relevant information about the Sun, but instead returns detailed facts about our Sun such as today's sunrise and sunset, it's exact position in the sky in terms that only an astronomer would understand, its distance from the Earth, its mass and temperature, a diagram that shows the current Earth-Sun-Moon configuration, and even a list of sources from which that information is culled.

A search for "G chord" shows sheet music notation, the names of the individual notes that make up the G chord, and even charts showing where the G chord is located on both the piano and guitar.

A search for "aspirin" does not give information about usage or safety, but does give scientific information such as the chemical name of aspirin, its density, its drug category, its molecular weight, and its boiling point.

Make no mistake about it, Wolfram Alpha is not for Grandma or the little kids. The information returned when you search is factual and completely bereft of opinion or entertainment value. You may think that this search engine has little use for anyone other than a college or high school students that are working on that report that happens to be due tomorrow, but take a moment to try it for yourself and see if you can find some of it's other uses.