• Search Engine Land, Monday, May 4, 2009 4:15 PM

A new search engine will emerge within the next few weeks based on Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica computational software. While Wolfram bills the site as a "computational knowledge engine," Danny Sullivan calls it a "fact search engine" or an "answer search engine," a term he writes has been used in the past for services designed to provide direct answers, rather than pointing you to pages that in turn might hold the answers.

In a Webinar on Friday, Wolfram provided insights into the capabilities offered by the site, which are quite detailed. Do a search on Wolfram Alpha, and if the site has matching data it presents a ton of information on a single page, from figures to charts. "For example, a search for 'newport beach' not only shows the current temperature and forecast but also provides easy access to historical temperatures, which also get charted," Sullivan writes in the lengthy post.

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