One Man's Answer.(International Edition)(new search engine Wolfram/Alpha)

Byline: Barrett Sheridan

Silicon Valley is full of imperial visionaries whose mission is to take down Google, which now controls about 64 percent of the search market worldwide. They range from Microsoft to newcomers like Cuil, but all of them have ended up merely battling one another on the outskirts of Google's dominion, fighting for the shrinking number of searches that Google hasn't yet figured out how to conquer.

Then there is physicist Stephen Wolfram. When he 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 Web sites seeking to find one that has already posted an answer to the question at hand. Instead, Wolfram|Alpha, as the technology is awkwardly named, 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. Doug Lenat, founder of Cycorp, an Austin, Texas-based company working on artificial intelligence, says that by promising to answer the kinds of questions you would ask only of "a colleague or an assistant or another intelligent human being," Wolfram|Alpha represents the next step on the way to "something very much like the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but minus the homicidal-maniac tendencies." Compared to that, says Lenat, searching on Google is "like asking your dog to fetch a newspaper."

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 date of the next total solar eclipse visible from Paris? (Answer: Sept. 23, 2090.) 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.

"You can think of it as a giant Excel spreadsheet, with all the laws of physics, economics equations, and formulas from various fields of science, mathematics and more," says Nova Spivack, the CEO and founder of Web startup Twine.com, who got a sneak peek of Alpha in March.

At this early stage, Wolfram|Alpha's knowledge reflects Wolfram's scientific background. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Caltech by age 20 and became the youngest winner of the MacArthur "genius" grant in 1981, just after his 22nd birthday. But for questions not rooted in science or numbers, Wolfram|Alpha throws up its hands. In two weeks of testing, the most common answer I received was, "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." It paints the world with a broad brush, and has little data at the local level--for instance, it can't tell you when the Maine Lobster Festival occurs or provide a synopsis for a book or a film.