Wolfram Alpha 'as important as Google'

A new search engine, due to launch in May, "could be as important as Google" according to experts who have been testing it.

Wolfram Alpha will challenge Google by aiming to answer questions directly, unlike the standard procedure of displaying a list of web pages in response to a query.

Speaking at a demonstration of the program at Harvard University, its creator, British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram, said: "Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime."

Wolfram Alpha operates by computing answers "on the fly" or in real time. Answers are derived from public and licensed databases as well as from live feeds that contain information such as share prices and weather updates.

Users will be able to ask straightforward and complicated questions and solve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures and chart natural events.

The site is currently only open to a small testing group, but it will be available to the public from the middle of May.

Stephen Wolfram says that using the eponymous tool "is like interacting with an expert. It will understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results".

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.

"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain," he wrote earlier this year. "It computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."

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