Google. Real Time Search - Social Mention. Hyped search engine Wolfram Alpha gets its first public showing. This afternoon in Boston, the Berkman Center at Harvard put on a live online demonstration of Wolfram Alpha, the forthcoming "knowledge engine" with a name better suited to a preening science fiction supervillain. Over the course of nearly two hours (much of which I could hear but not see from my perch in San Francisco) British scientist Stephen Wolfram showed off the system, described what was happening and answered questions on the project. It appeared that he stayed pretty much on a script of the sorts of data that he put into the search engine - this was not a fully open demo by any stretch of the imagination - although on a couple of occasions he did use search queries from the audience, but they were not generally successful.
Earlier this week ReadWriteWeb posted details of an intimate demo they were given, which has a lot of useful detail and is definitely worth reading if you are interested. But here are some bullet points on what we found out today: Have you got access to it? Search the web for any song in the world. PostRank.