The Answer Machine? Wolfram Alpha Debuts

June 1, 2009 — -- Wolfram Alpha. It sounds like a code name from World War II, or perhaps a term a wildlife biologist would know.

Instead, it's the name of an audacious, if quirky, Web site led by the scientist Stephen Wolfram -- not a search engine, and not meant to be the "Google killer" that it was sometimes described as being, but a "computational knowledge engine." It is a Web site that will answer your questions -- at least some of them -- even if nobody has ever asked them before.

"What we're trying to do is much more ambitious," said Wolfram, 49, the lead developer of the technology behind the project, on which he says he has worked 25 years. "We're trying to take the question you ask, and automatically produce for you the answer, not giving you a collection of links, and saying, 'Go read this Web site, go read that Web site.'"

Nova Spivack, a technology entrepreneur who got a demonstration from Wolfram, said he was impressed. "Wolfram Alpha works in a new way," he wrote. "It computes answers instead of just looking them up."

Go to Wolfram Alpha's home page and you'll see a long rectangular box, much like the ones on Google, Yahoo or any number of search sites. If you enter any of the most common searches people make -- "American Idol," perhaps, or "free e-mail" -- you'll probably get one reply: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

But ask it something more specific to your life -- the "quarter pound hamburger" you perhaps ate yesterday -- and it will tell you it had 297 calories, 22 percent of your fat allowance for the day, 19 percent of your sodium and so forth. If you enter "7 oz. burger," it will update the numbers.

Or try some math. Enter "square root of 41," and it will calculate the answer:

6.403124237432848686488217674621813264520420132621018885...

(If that's not precise enough for you, click where it says "More Digits.")