Components of Alpha
The main technologies behind this engine include:

• Data curation: Wolfram|Alpha uses public and licensed proprietary data sources, and the company uses automated processes and human choices to prepare the data.
• Algorithms: Alpha must pick the right computational processes to present its results. Inside Wolfram Alpha are 5 million to 6 million lines of Mathematica code that implement all those methods and models.
• Linguistic analysis to understand what a person typed.
• Presentation: Inside Alpha, there are tens of thousands of possible graphs.

  Wolfram can carry out complex math problems of Algebra, Matrices, Calculus, Trigonometry etc.

Picture Based Search
So, you can't remember who that person was in your wedding album or in the conference. Not a problem, scan it and upload it to an image based search site and ask it to find the person for you. This is what the nexgen search engines are working on. Today if you did a picture search of a celebrity like Katrina Kaif, you will be more successful! And a site called Picollator.com is trying to search for other pictures you upload to it as well. The site uses pattern recognition technologies to identify similar looking images on the Internet. But as it has to run complex algorithms on so many images available on the net, it's very slow as of today.

The search is also not very accurate, but it works. Google is also doing something similar with its web based version of Picasa, which is an image and picture management portal. With the help of this application, one can find similar faces in his/her complete photo library and tag them with a name. This of course is not able to find all pictures of a person but can find and recognize the face of a person wearing certain clothing and ambient situations very well.

But, don't think that similar technology can only have leisure advantages. It makes great business sense as well, and that's why the makers of VizSeek ?http://www.vizseek.com? came up with the idea of developing a search engine which can search for any tool just by a photograph or doodle sketch of it. This site was devised by some engineers keeping in mind that remembering the name of a tool or a part in repair work can sometimes become very difficult.