There's a lot of hype about WolframAlpha the "computational knowledge engine" - a sort of search engine of human knowledge along the lines of the semantic web. Sounds great although you do not have to use it for long before you realise it needs a lot of work to make it a practical source of information and facts. Of course the first search engines in 1995 were also pretty bad - hopefully WolframAlpha (or similar services) will show similar improvements and in a few years they'll be a practical source of information.

Of interest here are the maps and geographical components of WolframAlpha. WolframAlpha can find information about locations and calculate great circle distance. For example this query finds information about San Francisco and London, and the great circle arc connecting the two.

WolframAlpha also supports a number of different map projections (from Mathematica) and other geographic features. See http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/PlacesAndGeography.html for the full list of geographic queries. It could be a useful source of geographic features and maps for third party applications.

Although the media is tending to push WolframAlpha as a future replacement for Google, it is interesting to see that WolframAlpha drops down to Google Maps for satellite imagery.