Wolfram makes mathemtatica, an application that does mathemtatical calculations or graphs. The alpha is a new search engine that is supposed to be able to interpret questions that people write into it and find meaninful answers to the questions you ask and give related results. Stephen Wolfram, the founder of Wolfram research, has a PhD in Physics, and since 1973 has been pursuing the field of scientific computing.

go ask it is it self-aware, seriously

I gave it a run this morning.  While it has some interesting features I found nothing compelling about it to take me away from google (with Ubiquity and FF).

Interesting . . but no more than that for me.

I had misunderstood it's purpose, I thought it would be a bit more general purpose than it is. It seems like more of a computational tool than a search engine, it does interpret some language, but it's seems to be more interested in a quantitative output. 

I only got output for the frequency of my first name. My last name confused it.

don't forget its only in its early stages