A web tool hailed as a significant rival to search giant Google has gone live to the public.
Wolfram Alpha is called a computation knowledge engine rather than a search engine and wants to change the way people use online data.It aims to give people direct answers to queries rather than send them to other sites where they may find what they are seeking.The system is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.
Wolfram Alpha was unveiled in late April and since then has been publicly demonstrated and some people have had a chance to run queries through it.
Typically the results it returns are annotated pages of data rather than a simple list of other sites that might help resolve a user's query.For example, if asked about the weather in Manchester it would present a graph of average temperatures, rainfall and other salient data.
The computational horsepower behind the main site works out answers to question as they are put by grabbing data from databases and consulting feeds of relevant information.