The World Wide Web is absolutely riddled with forgotten, abandoned search engines that seemed like great ideas on paper and performed like a dead skunk in reality. But what about an “answer engine?” That’s what Wolfram Alpha claims to be. We’re kind of surprised to see Wolfram Alpha still pulling blog news, like this announcement on Read/Write Web. This is about how you can embed a fun little Wolfram Alpha widget on your site.
Really, an answer engine does sound like it’d be handy. Like talking to the HAL 9000, right? You ask a question and it answers. But reviews around the web at first ran to something like, well, this AskReaMaor guy really put it through its paces.