Making the World's Knowledge Computable

Has anyone had a go at the latest search engine - WolframAlpha?

They have an ambitious goal - to make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. (more about WolframAlpha). It is no Google killer yet but it seems to do a pretty good job of questions that have an exact answer. Try a search for city sydney for instance and you get a map, coordinates, population, current time and temperature amongst other things.

Is this bringing us closer to the possibility of having a completely free, all digital reference collection?

Best practices in Virtual Reference

Fresh from the ALA Midwinter conference featuring WorldCat local panel presentations are two innovative approaches to improving reference service for our users: building a better search engine using the knowledge of reference librarians (David Lankes, Information Institute of Syracuse) and building a multilingual, multinational reference service (Paul S. Ulrich, Berlin Central and Regional Library), followed by a Q & A session.
These videos are well worth watching and considering within the light of your own reference service.