This week’s website is a computational engine called Wolfram Alpha.  This is a site that just launched a few weeks ago and is still growing and getting better.  This isn’t your typical search engine like Google.  This is deisgned to do computations and calculations based on the data it knows.  It is designed not to search, but to answer questions.  So if you need to know “What is the population of Michigan?” it will tell you that as of 2006 it was 10.1 million people.  It also gives additional information about the population of Michigan.  If you just ask for “weather” it will give you the weather for your location, which it detects based on your IP address.  It is somewhat limited on what it can answer right now, but when it does understand what you are asking it is good.  To explore what it can do, try asking it for some of the following:

• Your first name
• Your date of birth
• The answer to life, the universe, and everything
• pint of ice cream with 2 chocolate chip cookies

You can view a tutorial of what it can do for you at http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html or see exmaples of what to ask at http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/