Physicist Stephen Wolfram’s computational Web engine has set technology watchers talking

When Stephen Wolfram wrote a blog post in early March announcing the imminent release of a new, highly sophisticated search engine, technology watchers from the Bay Area to Bangalore wondered if this was going to be The One. Wolfram claimed a breakthrough, an engine that does not merely crawl over websites seeking to find one that has already posted an answer to the question at hand. Instead, Wolfram/Alpha has at its disposal 10 trillion (and counting) points of data from fields like chemistry, meteorology, history and astronomy. It also houses a vast number of equations and algorithms to connect the numbers, giving it the ability to compute completely original responses. “How old was Britney Spears on Sept. 11, 2001?” might be a question that has never been asked before, but Alpha knows the answer (she was 19 years, 9 months and 9 days old). Curious how unhealthy your grandmother’s original chocolate-chip cookie recipe is? Input the ingredients, and Alpha calculates the calories.

Wolfram/Alpha is so new its impact is hard to predict, but some people believe it could transform search. Wolfram says his creation is not so much a search engine as a “computational knowledge engine”. It has a single input field, like a search engine, but users can pose complex questions. What is the current orbital location of the International Space Station? “Computing where the ISS is right now is not a trivial computation,” says Wolfram. “You have to actually solve some differential equations for the motion of the aircraft in the Earth’s gravitational field.” And yet the result is returned as quickly as a Google search.

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