Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, it’s a knowledge base -- but one that’s very smart. The site describes itself as: “a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers— not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.”
The best way to begin is to go to the home page and click on “random” searches. You’ll get the hang of what it can do with its prescribed search parameters.
Another way to explore the site is to go to the Examples page and play around with a particular category. For example, under Social Statistics, Crime, one example search is: “crime Texas.” The results page has simple, easy to read information about total crimes, a chart showing change in crime over time, the crime rate, property crimes, and violent crimes (with the option of more charts). There is a Source link at the bottom of the page to trace the data, and in this example if you click on the External Data sources, you will get a drop down bibliography of sources, which includes the US Dept of Justice BJS and National Center for Education Statistics, among others.
There are 30 categories in the free version of the site, and each category has multiple sub and sub-sub categories. It is amazing what you can discover here.
A few highlights:
“President of Argentina” = political leader name, photo, basic dates
“star chart San Diego” = generate a star chart for a location
“1000 to Babylonian” = 1000 in Babylonian numerals
“Russian language” = get information, basic words, and stats about a particular language
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