The weekend saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha – a search engine designed to do more than just return lists of results – in fact, it doesn’t work that way at all so if all you’re after is a picture of a chocolate bar you’re better off sticking to Google.

If, on the other hand, you want to know what’s in the chocolate then Wolfram comes into it’s own. The idea behind Wolfram is to make knowledge “computable” – in other words, to take raw information and turn it into something meaningful.

It does this by searching it’s own extensive database of facts and figures (instead of the whole internet) and letting you slice and dice the numbers however you want.

The best way to explain it is to try it out, so give it a go at www.wolframalpha.com. You can check out the extensive list of examples to get an idea of how much it knows.