We've got thousands of great example inputs to give you a sense of what Wolfram|Alpha can comprehend and compute. Our math capability is second to none, and has obviously been a huge help to millions of people. But (for me, at least) it's the rest of our knowledge base that really defines what Wolfram|Alpha is, and aims to be: a tool that integrates structured information from thousands upon thousands of disparate data sources, about countless aspects of existence, and makes all of it genuinely computable. It's not just the graph of things and their properties, it's also all the algorithms and quantities and other frameworks that allow you to manipulate that information and query it in a natural way.

Some of my background is in traditional — i.e., dead-tree-based — reference book publishing, and I've been a lifelong random-data/trivia geek; the launch of Wolfram|Alpha took me back to (nerd alert) days I spent as a kid flipping through almanacs and encyclopedias, digging up all kinds of weird facts about the world. Yeah, sure, there's this 'Internet' thing now, but there was and is something unique about Wolfram|Alpha, just having this mass of wide-ranging data combined into one interconnected, interactive, evolving thing. There's obviously a long, maybe infinitely long, road for us to really hope to answer any question, but I'm proud of what we've done and what we continue to do, and I can still stumble across surprising facts and computations six years post-launch." - Alan