The article I first read on WolframAlpha had a few search examples. I tried those examples - and most produced no results. I was not impressed. Will maybe try again this weekend if I can put aside 20 minutes or so to just play with it.
Irrelevant stuff on Wolfram follows:
Wolfram is an interesting guy. Mathematica is a serious piece of software. It's a competitor of MathCAD and Matlab for mathematical programming. Matlab originated as the name suggests as a solver for problems in matrix algebra. (Including large systems of differential equations, e.g., as well as linear programming problems.) This is a strong engineering focus and many engineering types use it (I do).
I've never used MathCAD, although some of my colleagues do. It's an engineering tool - it allows programming, but that doesn't seem to be its focus.
Mathematica is a completely different approach. You can do regular programming, but you can also just set up equations (as in MathCAD), but it will solve the equations, list all of the steps in the solution (feature not available in the student version). It will shoot for the analytic (closed form) solution if it can, before it tries to solve numerically. I've used it very little, but recall being very impressed. While I haven't used it in years, I'm pretty impressed with Wolfram.
I consider his company's website at mathworld.com by far the best mathematics resource on the web. (The site is maintained by Eric Weisstein, who has several times responded to inquiries I have made.)
Wolfram has also made a study of computation systems which he published in the book "A New Kind of Science" (often abbreviated to NKS). (I haven't read it yet, but I have it and it's on my list. Don't think I'll get to it this year.)
Finally, in a science group like this, everyone probably knows that the chemical symbol for Tungsten is not T or Tu, but W, which stands for "Wolfram."
