It’s not a search engine like Google – it doesn’t return pages and pages of details, instead it provides you with detailed answers to questions you ask it.

Want to do complex math? No problem, after all Wolfram also developed Mathematica. Want to know the GDP of Canada compared to that of Ireland? It’s got an answer. Want to know the weather on the day you were born? It knows that. Want to sequence DNA? It can do that too.

It also knows a bit about your college’s website. It will tell you where it’s hosted, some basic stats (gathered from sources like Alexa, I’d wager) and some stats about your home page.

My favorite was the beautiful map it made of elements on my college’s homepage:

Click for a larger version.

I don’t know if you’ll learn anything out about your site that you didn’t already know, but you should at least check the validity of the information. That’s part of the fun of managing a college’s website, a decent amount of our time is spent making sure everyone else has the right information.

The press release says:

The openly published SWF specification describes the file format used to deliver rich applications and interactive content via Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.

So, soon Google and others will index Flash files. Is that good or bad? I’m not sure.

For a lot of reasons, chief among them accessibility, I’ve tried to limit my uses of Flash to a minimum, but it’s become the de facto method for delivering video content. For search crawlers, these SWF files will be tricky because they usually call in a separate FLV video file. For the best SEO, you’ll want to robots to crawl your video description. Kyle has some good SEO tips.

Hopefully, this will not entice higher ed developers to use Flash more and more, especially for things like navigation, since it will be crawled. Badly designed and managed Flash is just as harmful as badly designed HTML.