Meet WolframAlpha, Google’s latest challenger

Next month, British mathematician Stephen Wolfram launches the internet's most ambitious search engine since Google. It might not be blessed with the catchiest name in tech-biz, but according to believers WolframAlpha will change the very game of Internet search. Cynics, however, are calling it a colossal act of scientific hubris, a stunt that could still end in disaster.

Pre-release images of the WolframAlpha search page show something that looks deceptively like Google.com: a simple search box, and a clickable search button. That's where the similarity ends.

Google retrieves results by trawling the Web, comparing search terms with website content and displaying pages that match. Google doesn't understand our search; nor can it provide any information that hasn't already been published by a third party. In other words, it can answer only the questions that have already been asked, and answered, by content providers and Web publishers.

Google doesn’t understand our search, it only finds information already published

Stephen Wolfram describes WolframAlpha as a "computational knowledge engine". Not only does it understand the question, it has the mathematical, computational ability to work out an accurate answer. It's primed to answer factual questions related to financial and economic statistics, cooking, geography and much more, questions that haven't necessarily been answered by somebody else. Wherever there's data to be demanded, computed and served, WolframAlpha will, if all goes to plan, be there.

At its philosophical heart is Wolfram's theory (explored in his controversial book A New Kind Of Science) that scientific problems can be reduced to a series of "simple programs". But its engineering heart is Mathematica, maths computer software devised by Wolfram in the late 1980s and continuously developed by Wolfram Research ever since. Within Mathematica are all the "simple programs", theorems and systems to convert raw data into useful answers to real-life questions. If WolframAlpha works, it will be seen as practical validation of the Wolfram