Rumor has it there’s a new search engine on the loose — or about to be on the loose. Its called Wolfram Alpha and it is being billed as a computational knowledge engine which on the surface sounds much better than the traditional search engine nomenclature that we are all accustomed to. It’s also being called the Internet’s holy grail, a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does

According to one article, Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location, nearby towns, other mountains, graphs and charts. College just got a whole lot easier. The real innovation, however, is its ability to work things out “on the fly,” according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. This is mind boggling to me. Start thinking of questions like this you’d like the answers to…

One kink in the armor ironically is a search on “50 Cent,” which caused some issues because the search engine confused currency with the rapper. I’m sure Dr. Wolfram and his boys were laughing their asses off. Back to the drawing board…. 

Launching in May, Wolfram Alpha is currently being tested by people who sign up on their website to put it through its paces. I sent an email asking to try it out. On the form it had a section for a message in which I wrote, “The worst you can do is say no.” I’m no Internet insider but I am just as curious as the next guy. We’ll see what the response is. I’ll keep you posted.

Google is working on a similar search engine in beta currently as well. It will be interesting to see which one figures how who to handle 50 Cent first. My money’s on the computational knowledge engine — it just sounds better.