Wolfram Alpha Launch: The Dawn of a New Era for the Web?
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
Wolfram Alpha is an intriguing new search engine which is based on building a large set of facts into a system and making it computable. On May 15th at 7 pm, WolframAlpha became public. Initial queries like “What is the meaning of life?” Answer: 42 were quite hilarious. (fyi, references the age-old Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy)
After a few more queries, it became clear that there are a lot of facts which the system does not yet know about. However, we believe that it will quickly change.
Popularity: 21% [?]

Most people don’t know the sordid history of automated query tools with Google.