Interesting spin on a search engine

WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.

This search / information retrieval tool (it's not a search engine since it does not search the WWW but its own repositories) deals with factual information. 'It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.'

Enter a place name or a chemical formula and see what you get.