Wolfram Alpha Up Today

Can you feel it? That giddy buzz humming all over the Web? That's the sound of tech geeks getting their groove on as Wolfram Alpha, the next generation of search engines and potential Google Killer, goes live today. Well, technically, it's been in soft launch for the last few days, allowing users around the world to test out some of its features and get a feel for how it works. But today's the big day, and pocket protectors on all seven continents are melting from the cyberlust.

What's so great about Wolfram Alpha? Unlike Google (GOOG), which scans keywords in a search query and offers you thousands of ranked Web sites that might contain the information you're looking for, Wolfram Alpha reads your question in natural language, scans its own databases, and gives you the answer. Wanna know who shot Kennedy? No more poring through Wikipedia or history Web sites looking for hints. Now, all you have to do is ask, and Wolfram Alpha will give you the answer: Cui bono. Sorry, we meant Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald.

Of course, Google hasn't been sitting back and waiting for Wolfram Alpha to take all the glory. Over the last few weeks, the company has been rolling out new and pending search features to beef up its power and steal a few headlines back from Stephen Wolfram, the brilliant but mercurial brain behind the new search engine. Among Google's new tricks: an option to narrow search results by time and Google Squared, an option to give users answers instead of Web links to possible answers, which should roll out by the end of the month. As Business Week writer Rob Hof points out, the former is clearly aimed at Twitter, and the latter's crosshairs are right on Wolfram Alpha.

But will these new natural-language queries really work? After all, if making computers understand when you ask, "Who's cooler, Kirk or Picard?" were easy, we'd have done it a long time ago. Here are some reviews of Wolfram Alpha so far.

Chris Sherman at Search Engine Land is deeply impressed. Although it takes a little work to get used to the new query format (Sherman recommends you read over sample queries and the results they give), the new site offers a wide variety of fascinating information, gracefully presented, on the spot. Historical events, pharmaceutical information, musical notes—Wolfram Alpha has made search something entirely new again. "Even beyond impressive, the words that best describe the experience of using Wolfram Alpha are 'fun' and 'enchanting,' " Sherman writes.

Gordon Kelly at Trusted Reviews is similarly agog, although he thinks that Wolfram Alpha's focus on statistics and cold, hard data will make it more of a threat to Wikipedia than Google.