Beyond google

Recently I came across two Search engines which are unique and noticeable. The first one is Wolframalpha.com, a computational knowledge engine it claims. You can ask many scientific questions on this website and get a direct answer on one page instead of receiving gooooooooooogles of result pages and having to find your real answer through. Your question should be somehow scientific and specific and the engine is pretty good with numbers, statistics and probability. You can ask questions like:

What was the weather in London on the day Prince William was born?

Price of Nike stock on the day Wayne Rooney was born

Total length of all roads in Spain

10 smallest countries by area

I challenged Mr. Wolfram's engine a little bit more by searching the word knowledge, this is the answer I got:
"the psychological Result of perception and learning and reasoning"

And then I looked up "computational knowledge", I got:
"that which I endeavor to compute"

And then "computational knowledge engine", the answer:
"an engine that generates Output by doing computations From it's own Internal knowledge base instead of searching the web and returning links."

Next time you find yourself looking up a fact or computational knowledge! make sure you visit WolframAlpha.com too.

The second website is called Quora.com. I like this one better. It's a well designed web 2.0 question/answer website or I should say question engine and of course tag enabled. The best thing about a question engine is that it helps you find a lot of good questions when you don't know what to ask and you know this happens a lot!

This was my first experience on Quora:

I entered "coaching" in the box, it gave me a bunch of questions, I selected
"What are the differences between a coach and a mentor?" this question was tagged by Leadership, coaching, learning and mentoring. I clicked learning and of course more questions. This time I selected "what are the emerging alternatives to universities"

One of the answers suggested iTunes university which I totally agree but I think "search" is the best teacher and also the best university.