© PingsweptStephen Wolfram
While not a traditional web search engine, a new challenger is emerging on Friday - WolframAlpha, named after the man behind the venture, British-born scientist and inventor Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram, who earned a PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech at the age of 20, is careful not to call his latest invention a search engine, describing it instead as a "computational knowledge engine".
Unlike Google, which takes a query and uses algorithms to return a series of links to relevant websites, WolframAlpha.com takes a query and crunches through its databases to return answers.
"The basic idea of WolframAlpha is very simple," Wolfram said in an online presentation of his venture, which is scheduled to go live for a test run at 8:00 pm Friday (0000 GMT Saturday).
"You type your input, your question and WolframAlpha produces a result."
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.com, said in a telephone interview with AFP that WolframAlpha is a "really interesting tool".
"I try to describe it as a 'fact search engine' to help people understand the degree that it's different from Google," he said.
"Google tends to point to stuff while (WolframAlpha) actually have some answers."
He said WolframAlpha was not presenting itself as a rival to Google "although they want to capture the general search audience too.
"They're saying they're not trying to wipe out Google but they feel they do the kinds of searches that Google doesn't handle," Sullivan said.
"If you're trying to get facts this might be a handy kind of encyclopedia for you.
However, Sullivan said the Massachusetts-based WolframAlpha "has some issues."
"It can be kind of finicky," he said.
"It doesn't have answers to everything that you might try," Sullivan said.
Agence France-Presse
here is a demo of it in action:
[Link]