There are two new search engines vying to at least partially unseat Google: Bing and Wolfram Alpha. There are actually many search engines bubbling under the surface out there, each with a unique spin on how searching is done, but these two are getting all the buzz. It’s a good thing, really. As good as Google is, its algorithms can’t be bias-free and can’t yet read your mind. Sometimes a Google search will focus in the wrong direction for what you want, or sometimes there is too much “noise” obscuring what you want. Searching for “John Smith” may not find the John Smith you want.
I haven’t yet tried Bing (it was still under wraps last I checked, about a week ago). It seems to be more of a commercial advisor, helping you sort out options when you want to compare prices and such. Or at least that’s what the ads tell me.
Wolfram Alpha comes from Wolfram Research, the folks that produce Mathematica. It aims to be the equivalent of an almanac, a storehouse of numbers and basic facts. If you want the population of each US state, you could go through each entry in Wikipedia or try to Google a page with that info. Enter “state population” into Alpha and you should get a list of populations. Except you don’t. Alpha seems to have a “Rain Man”-like bent; if you hit a question it can answer, it will perform well and sometimes surprise you with its depth. If it doesn’t understand (and right now that happens a lot) it just hits a brick wall.
A friend told me to type in my first name into Alpha. It poured back census information and projections about how many Jeffs there are in each age cohort and a few other facts. Apparently I was born at the end of the great Jeff Boom and my name is slowly dying out. Not many Jeffs under 30:

(the graph shows the percent of all Jeffs at each age. Presumably the total area under the graph is 100%)

It’s also amazing for math. It’s basically a front-end for Mathematica, so you can enter a math function, or an integral, or ask for a graph, or ask for a polyhedron and it will make it happen. Want to know the value of gamma(2.3)? It’s 1.166. Wait, there’s more!

Curious what a snub cube looks like?

It will also tell you the volume and surface area of the snub cube.
Unfortunately, Alpha (like many 14-year-old boys) has a very math based view of the world. After reading an article on China’s “One Child” policy, I entered in “world population projection” and got

which tells me the projection of the world population vector (v) onto another vector (u). I’m not sure what dimension this takes place in, nor how the world population can be a vector quantity, or what vector I would project it onto. I certainly wouldn’t mind being orthogonal to a few annoying people, but I don’t believe that’s an option for me.
I like Alpha at its best. It’s really a great resource for math, and promises some interesting ways of looking at factual data. Unfortunately the best features seem hand-wired and don’t carry over. Some programmer thought the age distribution for names would be a cool feature and coded it in. Until somebody decides to focus some time on the “population” displays, they will remain lame. I think having an online almanac is a really good idea, but it’s going to take a lot of work to make one worth using.