Wolfram|Alpha Launches, Includes Football Data

For those of you who also follow the tech press, there's been a fair amount of hype this week regarding the launch of Wolfram|Alpha, a would-be Google killer in search (though said tech press will go to great, great pains to insist that it isn't, that it's completely different, etc etc).  The gist of Wolfram|Alpha is that it's not going to crawl the web to answer questions.  It's going to collect data centrally, and make sure it can understand (a) the relationships between the data and (b) the natural language queries that relate to the data.  Essentially, you can ask it questions about data, and it tries to give you data as an answer.  More broadly, it looks like the most popular step yet towards the much ballyhooed (again, in certain really nerdy circles) semantic web.     

While the early reviews have been tepid (and the product is admittedly still an alpha), I played with it a little this morning in the hopes that it would include sports data (not shockingly, the tech press did not focus on this in their reviews).  I was pleasantly surprised to see that it not only contained football data, but that it was also pretty easy to use.

For example, the query "Philadelphia Eagles, New York Giants sacks" gets you not only the teams' sack totals for the 2008 season, but a chart mapping those totals over the past 30 years:

Whereas the Google results for the same query get you the standard page of blue links:

Obviously, Wolfram|Alpha is still pretty young (the servers were timing out a bit as I was playing with it), but it's nice to see that they included sports stats in their initial data sets.  I wouldn't, ahem, say that this is a mainstream service quite yet, but if you're a sports nerd (staring nervously at ground), it certainly makes for a nifty new toy.  And if you're interested in seeing web search take a step beyond the page of blue links and start actually answering your questions, I'd say this is a pretty encouraging product.    

Check it out.