Wolfram Alpha search engine launches

Wolfram Alpha, the revolutionary search engine and brainchild of British inventor Stephen Wolfram, has officially been launched. Wolfram Alpha: A First Look Unlike traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo, Wolfram Alpha is capable of responding to search queries "on the fly" rather than merely pointing to other websites. The free service is able to answer queries such as the distance between two cities, the population of London or the height of Mount Everest. It does this by crunching numbers from reams of online databases. Wolfram Alpha was given a soft launch in April, where it has been undergoing testing from its base in the US. During a demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society last month, Dr Wolfram said: "Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime." Speaking at its unveiling, Nova Spivak, the founder of the semantic web tool Twine, said Wolfram Alpha has the potential to be as important to the web as Google. The data it consults is chosen and managed by staff at Wolfram Research. Wolfram Alpha uses about 10,000 CPUs (central processing units) spread across five data centres to grind out its answers. Although it is currently free of advertising, the company plans to introduce it at a later date. Last week, another new search engine, Hulbee, was launched.