• Wired, Monday, May 11, 2009 1:17 PM

Wolfram|Alpha is the latest Google Killer that probably won't kill Google. But then again, it probably won't die on the vine, either, like so many would-be Google Killers that came before it. Indeed, Alpha is powered by very different technology than anything we've ever seen before. The brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, a 49-year-old former particle physicist, Alpha is unique in that if you type in a query for a statistic -- say, the average speed of a sparrow -- you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real-time. Unlike other search engines, you don't get a series of results based on how many times the keywords you typed in were linked to. As Wired's Steven Levy says, "It's like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser."

Levy uses the following examples: type in "Pluto" and Alpha calculates its distance from Earth at that very instant. Enter a series of letters like "ACTCGTC" and Alpha will recognize it as genetic code and tell you what strand of DNA that particular gene lives on and what we know about it. This search engine is all about indexing data sets, rather than Web pages, which Wolfram has either licensed or created. Among them: Wikipedia, the U.S. Census, and "about nine-tenths of what you'd see on the main shelves of a reference library," Wolfram says. Alpha can even answer questions like, "How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?"

So what's the business model? Well, that's still somewhat of an open question. "Maybe it will be a giant piece of philanthropy," Wolfram says, quickly adding, "we're happy to license this." Or perhaps sell the technology to, someone like Google or Microsoft.

Read the whole story at Wired »