Wolfram Alpha: A new kind of search engine

How long does it take to get to Saturn at, say, the speed of light?

With Wolfram Alpha, the online "computational knowledge engine" that launched Monday, the answer -- 75 minutes -- can be found in a fraction of a second.

Web users can submit customized questions to the service, and Wolfram Alpha will try to work out the answer on the fly. The chance that a healthy 35-year-old woman will contract heart disease in the next 10 years? One in 167. The temperature in Washington, D.C., during the July 1976 bicentennial? An average of 74 degrees.

For questions like these, Google and Wikipedia, perhaps the two best known online reference tools, would search through vast databases of existing Web pages hoping for a match.

Not so with Wolfram Alpha. "We're not using the things people have written down on the Web," said Stephen Wolfram, the project's creator and the founder of Wolfram Research Inc., which is based in Champaign, Ill. "We're trying to use the actual corpus of human knowledge to compute specific answers."

To do that, Wolfram and his team of human curators have equipped their system with a wide array of mathematical equations, as well as 10 terabytes of data from thousands of sources: scientific journals, encyclopedias, government repositories and any other source the company feels is credible. That generally doesn't include user-created websites.

How much data is 10 terabytes? Ask Wolfram Alpha: It'll tell you that's about half the text-based content held by the Library of Congress.

And there's more to come.

Adding more data and computational capability is an endless process, Wolfram said. "The main thing we have to do is to work with experts in every possible domain."

Whether all that specific knowledge will translate into advertising dollars remains to be seen. Some analysts are skeptical about the site's potential to become a Google-like thoroughfare for online consumption.

Most search revenue comes from people doing commerce-related searches, said Douglas Clinton, an analyst at investment firm Piper Jaffray Cos. "You're not going to want an answer from Wolfram Alpha's computer about what the best digital camera is, because there's not really an algorithmic answer to a question like that."

As a much-hyped entrant into the knowledge search market, Wolfram Alpha has not escaped comparisons to Google and speculation about whether it could steal some of the search giant's massive market share.