I don't think Wolfram|Alpha has gotten enough publicity (not that putting it on my blog will help with that). It is definitely the next generation of search engines. It combines data from google searches, databases, and Mathematica to not only retrieve information but put it in a useful format. It also traces your IP and chooses results most likely to relate to you. For instance, if I search Springfield from my PC, it assumes I mean Springfield, Virginia because it is only a few towns over. Here are a few more examples:

weather in washington dc when rickey henderson was born. Despite the fact that Rickey Henderson was born in Chicago and has nothing to do with D.C., it retrieves his birthday and displays the weather in Washintgon, D.C. on that date. It turns the information into graph form, which is typically much more useful than straight data.

internet usage in europe. Again it displays it in a variety of forms, including a color-coded map, all which it generates real-time. It does not have to store all of this information (graphs, maps) anywhere on a server; it just calculates it as you search.

x^2 sin(x). Not sure what is going to keep people from cheating on math homework. You can go down to the derivative section and click "show steps," and it will show the answer and every step and rules that were applied.

new york. Basic city search. Shows current local weather in addition to the usual population-type stuff.

ibm apple intel. Real-time stock comparison. It not only shows current prices, but it plots graphs that historically compare the prices of the stocks you entered. It also compares their performance vs. that of the S&P500, bonds, and T-bills. This is all information that was readily available before, but this kind of comparison would have taken at least 30 minutes of work prior to Wolfram|Alpha. Now it takes seconds.

eiffel tower sears tower empire state building. It shows all measurements in standard U.S. measurements because it knows I am searching from a computer in the United States. Metric can easily be accessed, of course, by clicking "Show Metric."

2 slices bread + 8oz 2% milk + 2 eggs + 1tsp butter + 1tsp olive oil. Typical American breakfast. I included the butter for the toast and the olive oil for the eggs. It combines nutritional information for all listed ingredients and makes a food-label type list of nutritional information. Normally it would take some time and thought to calculate the calories alone in this meal. Now you can see everything from calories/fat content to Riboflavin content in seconds. If you would like to be more specific, you can change a lot of the information at the top of the page, just under the search query bar. You can change "eggs" to poached, fried, scrambled, etc. You can change the type of bread to wheat, rye, pumpernickel...

$200,000 15 year mortgage at 4.125% interest.

valentine mcdaniel huff young. Comparison of a lot of surnames in my family. It can also tell you how two people are related like daughter of my first cousin or great uncle's father's brother's daughter's son.

That's quite enough. Most categories can be expanded by clicking "More" in the upper-right corner of the results box. Also, you can save the results of any search as a .pdf file to be used in presentations and the like.