Revolutionary search engine will change how we surf

Potential Google killer WolframAlpha will launch in May.

The day when internet users can ask a computer a 'normal' question and get the correct answer is closer than you might think.

WolframAlpha - a search engine project that has the power to blow away Google (at least until the web giant writes a big cheque) - is due to launch this year.

Designed by English uber boffin Stephen Wolfram, the particle physics genius behind science computing package Mathematica and the controversial book A New Kind of Science, the new computational data engine takes us one step closer to the holy grail of search.

Announced on his blog this week, WolframAlpha does not spit out a host of potentially-related answers to a search query, but rather draws on a vast collection of algorithms, Mathematica and NKS to produce the actual answer.

It is not, as a few in the blogosphere have commented, the real life equivalent of Deep Thought from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which responded to being asked the answer to life, the universe and everything with "Forty-two".

While search engines like Google cache pages from around the internet and use keywords and previous searchers to find possible matches, WolframAlpha will actually compute an answer to a question.

As Google continues to grow almost unchecked, scientists are still pushing to create a system that will - as sci-fi books and films have shown for years - understand human language.

It is no mean feat, and while several have claimed breakthroughs, none have really delivered. One company, Powerset, raised funding and built a limited search engine for Wikipedia before being snapped up by Microsoft for US$100million in 2008.

"A lot of it [knowledge] is now on the web - in billions of pages of text," Wolfram wrote on his blog. "And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.

"But we can't compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can't figure anything new out."

"I wasn't at all sure it was going to work. But I'm happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually managing to make it work.

"Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task," he said. "It's certainly the most complex project I've ever undertaken."

"With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.

"I think it's going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web."

Wolfram expects the new search engine to go live here in May.

- NZ HERALD STAFF