That seems like more of what WolframAlpha caters to. Personally, I don't like assuming an engine has interpreted what I'm looking for correctly - I'd prefer to maintain some of the load of personally understanding the source of information and it's context. So here is what I do:
>> distance from Los Angeles to New York
!m los angeles to new york
>> Joe Biden age
!w joe biden
>> knives out cast
!imdb knives out
>> capital of South Africa
!w South Africa
And that last one is a really good example of why I don't want to trust an engine to interpret what I'm looking for, because Wolfram Alpha just tells you Pretoria, and if I hadn't spent a large part of my life there I wouldn't know that's probably not what people are looking for. Economically? They probably want to know that Johannesburg is the largest city. Just like how people are sometimes surprised when they learn that New York City and Los Angeles are not state capitals, even though they're really important cities. Politically? Well the roles of the government is split between 3 cities and that's not a simple thing for an engine to comprehend. And I didn't even know Bloemfontein held that kind of status until I just read it on Wikipedia. Neither I, a former citizen of the country, nor WolframAlpha, was aware of that.
Google and Bing both list all three capitals of South Africa. They also write out how they've interpreted your query so you can tell if they're giving you the answer to the right question.
Color me impressed by them, then - but it's still not the kind of thing I entirely trust to an engine. Even though in this specific example we're discussing in detail, it's doing the right thing. Hard to know when it's not. The "explanation" of how it was interpreted isn't much.
I'm also biased by the fact that I'm constantly delighted by the random things I learn by consulting Wikipedia about virtually every topic I encounter.
>> distance from Los Angeles to New York
!m los angeles to new york
>> Joe Biden age
!w joe biden
>> knives out cast
!imdb knives out
>> capital of South Africa
!w South Africa
And that last one is a really good example of why I don't want to trust an engine to interpret what I'm looking for, because Wolfram Alpha just tells you Pretoria, and if I hadn't spent a large part of my life there I wouldn't know that's probably not what people are looking for. Economically? They probably want to know that Johannesburg is the largest city. Just like how people are sometimes surprised when they learn that New York City and Los Angeles are not state capitals, even though they're really important cities. Politically? Well the roles of the government is split between 3 cities and that's not a simple thing for an engine to comprehend. And I didn't even know Bloemfontein held that kind of status until I just read it on Wikipedia. Neither I, a former citizen of the country, nor WolframAlpha, was aware of that.