A new search engine: WolframAlpha - (May/30/2009 )

Since May of this year it's online and perhaps for one or another scientist of interest. It's NOT a google-substitute (or for the google alternatives). The search engine answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might (from wikipedia>).

Or in their words:

"Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

Try it out, not bad for some queries: Wolfram|Alpha

hmm, interesting, but not practically useful.