Wolfram Alpha: A new kind of search engine

But their mission statements make it clear that the two services are not identical.

Google famously hopes to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The focus of Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, is to "make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything."

Lofty hopes, but neither is there yet.

Wolfram Alpha can display the molecular structure of the solvent acetone. It can list recent earthquakes near most U.S. cities. And it can tell you the rate of inflation in Tanzania.

Yet it gets tripped up on a question as simple as "What time is it?"

As Wolfram himself points out, making the engine smarter is not just a matter of shoveling in more data. Even when the answer already exists in the database, the software may simply be unable to understand the question.

"What time is it in California," for instance, yields the correct result.

Half the battle, then, is teaching the program to parse human language so it knows what it's being asked to do.

But as rough as it may seem now, Wolfram Alpha looks to be the leading edge of a newer, smarter crop of search engines.

It's the use of so-called semantic technologies, where computers grapple with concepts and simple learning, that may define the next generation of Web services.

Does that mean artificial intelligence? Not quite yet, said James Hendler, a professor of computer science at New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"Computers are getting very good at the sort of powerful learning that comes from recognizing patterns in very large sets of data," he said. "But they still haven't gotten at all good at figuring out the very general, intuitive, complex things that make us human."

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david.sarno@latimes.com