This looks like being both very cool and incredibly useful. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine of sorts developed by Stephen Wolfram which computes factual answers to user entered questions.
Compare this to a standard search engine, which broadly works by creating a large index of information (web pages for example) and then comparing a query against this index to deliver results. This is what Google does and you would probably agree that it works pretty well.
…in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.
Wolfram Alpha however builds on Mathematica to generate new answers from existing information. It uses clever algorithms and heuristics to translate natural language into computable data, and then generates an answer to the question based on information known to be factual.
Clearly it will not be answering ambiguous questions or questions to which there is no solid factual answer, and neither is it designed to do so. Rather it will be a resource for answering factual questions with a distinct, unambiguous answer.
The phrase “paradigm altering” is something of a cliché these days, but I think it is genuinely applicable in this case. It is due to launch in May and should be a big deal if it works as advertised.