Today's awesome site, http://www.powerset.com, is a semantic web search engine. In a nutshell, instead of searching for just "George Washington's Birthday." in text, it searches for "George Washington's Birthday," and based on the pages around the text, determines what it is you are searching for. In our case of G. W.'s birthday, it returns this at the top:
How about that! It determined that we were looking for a date, and returned a nice big friendly icon at the top, followed by search results.
Currently, Powerset only searches the wikipedia, but it's expected to expand to the rest of the web soon. So keep it on your bookmarks, as an addition to your fact finding arsenal. And also, some people speculate that Google will probably try and buy this startup, which would be a wise move on their part.
