Wolfram Alpha, the Future of Search?

Stephen Wolfram's new search engine has been all over the web this weekend, touted as a "Google-killer" and much-hyped by the media. This unlikely and clumsily-named little piece of web gadgetry has the potential to revolutionise the way we find information. The "Computational Knowledge Engine" is ground-breaking because of the way it can "understand" and manipulate the data you search for. It is even heralded as a step towards artificial intelligence, because of its ability to take complex questions in natural language and compute a relevant result. By comparison, Google starts to look worryingly like a list of the dead. The sheer amount of irrelevant information on most web search results pages is often enough to make you cry into the collar of your Star Trek T-shirt. Wolfram Alpha will change this. It will be captivating.

All of which is why I'm now so frustrated that the damn thing, despite having been publicly lauded with such energy, is not actually usable yet. It is still in closed BETA-testing mode. So we're left with a situation where one of the most important leaps forward in computer science is just around the corner, but with a vague "it'll be open some time in May" caveat.

That's simply not cricket! I want to play with it now! I want it to be hard at work calculating the distance to Mars in sound wavelengths of D Minor. I want it to be telling me how many times I can listen to the Flight of the Bumblebee before the 2012 Olympics. I want it to confirm the correlation between the decline in Piracy over the last century and rising carbon dioxide levels. I want it to wrestle for milliseconds over the complex question of whether more money has been made from selling coffee or gold in the history of man. It must be straining away under the weight of such problems as how many average-weight thoroughbred horses the Space Shuttle can carry into low Earth orbit, or what the capital of Somaliland divided by the capital of Rutland is. Wolfram Alpha is capable of answering these questions and more. So why is the world left in the unenviable position of knowing about its potential for surreal time-wasting, but not able to use it?

It's a crime against my manic over-active imagination. I need it now. Otherwise, I may explode from daft inquisitiveness.