"an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would".
They don't actually search for stuff that may be stored somewhere else on the Internet, but finds information and makes calculations. A simple example would be to enter your birthdate. As you can see it gives quite a bit of calculated information on the date you were born.
The biggest news from Wolfram|Alpha is that they recently released an API for developers. The way it works is you would send a web request using the same search query you would enter into search box in their website. It will return the same results as well. The are ways that you can manipulate the results so they are useful to the information that you want. The downfall of the API is that it will cost you to use it. You can take a look at the Wolfram API site for more information.
The biggest news from Wolfram|Alpha is that they recently released an API for developers. The way it works is you would send a web request using the same search query you would enter into search box in their website. It will return the same results as well. The are ways that you can manipulate the results so they are useful to the information that you want. The downfall of the API is that it will cost you to use it. You can take a look at the Wolfram API site for more information.
