If you keep up on tech news, you’ve doubtlessly seen all the hype surrounding Wolfram|Alpha, the new not-exactly-search-engine that’s making big waves in the web search industry. Your traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc all work on the same basic principle: finding web pages based on keywords. Wolfram|Alpha isn’t about bringing web pages to the user, it’s about bringing information to the user.

Let’s say you open up Google and enter a query like “Princess Bride Cast”. You’d get results linking to several pages with info on who was in that cinematic masterpiece. It would probably look something like this: