The Ultimate Google Killer?

Google's utility and power have remade the way we think, acquire knowledge, and live in the world, unleashing the power of the Web in ways we never thought possible 10 years ago. But it has always fallen short of its most ambitious goal: getting a computer to answer a simple question, asked in natural language. Now, British scientist Stephen Wolfram claims that he may have the answer, and his new search engine could theoretically remake computing as dramatically as Google did a decade earlier.

Here's how Google's search model works. If you type, "When did Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address," the company's algorithms use the keywords in your search, scan the universe of data, and analyze links to rank results, offering you more than 15,000 sites that are relevant to the words you typed. Wolfram claims that if you type, "When did Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address" into his new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, you will simply get the answer: Nov. 19, 1863.

When Stephen Wolfram makes such a promise, people tend to listen. He's long been a wunderkind in the world of computing, earning a Caltech Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the age of 20 and developing Mathematica, a key breakthrough in computational software, in 1988. He spent 10 years working on his 2002 book, A New Kind of Science, in which he studied simple computer programs and concluded that they can produce remarkable complexity; moreover, Wolfram made some fairly extraordinary claims about how the study of such simple programs can lead to breakthroughs in almost every field of research science, claims that have been alternately praised and vilified around the world.

Now, Wolfram has announced that when his search engine launches in May, people can use his simple programs to interact with computers intuitively, using ordinary language to find what they're looking for.

"Getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult," Wolfram writes on his blog. "And for example we're still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web. But if one's already made knowledge computable, one doesn't need to do that kind of natural language understanding. All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do. ... I'm happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually managing to make it work."

The Wolfram Alpha Web site mirrors Google's simplicity: all white space, with one search field for you to ask a simple question. It has Google's format and supposedly will do the one thing not even Google can do: talk to you like a human being.