Wolfram Alpha launch on schedule

Google-rival due in "just a few weeks"

29 April 2009 9:49 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

We brought you the news that a new kind of search engine is in development, hyped as a strong challenger to Google, but can now reveal that Wolfram Alpha is on schedule to go live in "just a few weeks".

Wolfram/Alpha is a "computational knowledge engine" in development by British computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, that will be able to compute the answer to any factual question.

Wolfram/Alpha's mixture of "many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amounts to some serious theoretical breakthroughs", means, in Wolfram's words: "actually managing to make it work".

The new search engine should be capable of understanding what it is you are asking and be able to calculate a precise answer to your query.

In a blog post, Wolfram Alpha says: "Our teams are working hard to meet our goal of having Wolfram|Alpha ready for you in just a few weeks".

We will keep you posted on the May launch.

Full tags

Software, Search engines, Wolfram Alpha