Later this month, the semantic web search engine, Wolfram|Alpha, will be available.  Wolfram|Alpha will be a completely new kind of search engine, and it has the potential of becoming just as important as Google in data searches.

Wolfram|Alpha is being called a Computational Knowledge Engine rather than a Search Engine.  Wolfram|Alpha’s search results will be much different than results from Google.  When you search with Wolfram|Alpha, you will get computed answers based on your search.  Wolfram|Alpha will not simply search for an answer from a database, but compute an answer for your question.

Wolfram|Alpha gives a good example on their blog…

To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute. If you ask Wolfram|Alpha the distance to the moon, it tells you not only the conventionally quoted average distance, but also the actual distance right now, which can at times be well over ten thousand miles off the average. The actual distance is a figure that can be arrived at only by computation based on the moon’s known orbital parameters. It’s rocket science, if you will.

Wolfram|Alpha had a short live test on May 7.    Currently they plan to go live on May 18.  I am looking forward to seeing how their Computational Knowledge Engine will shape research.