Those of you who versed in the more technical aspects of the web will have done well to avoid talk of a new search engine that went live recently – Wolfram Alpha.With it came the inevitable web chat speculating whether this would be the technology to finally put a considerable dent into Google's considerable online presence.

Before we get to that, it is important to first establish what Wolfram Alpha actually is as to call it a search engine would be to miss the point slightly.The Wikipedia definition informs us that is an "answer engine" that "online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data".In simple terms, users enter a computational query via the text box and Wolfram Alpha generates results in a number of textual and graphical formats, as well as suggesting other topics.

As an example, inputting "70 miles per hour" will reveal a number of conversions to other units of speed (1680 miles per day) as well as offering other fun and quirky statistics by way of example (75 miles per hour is apparently an approximation of a cheetah's running speed).

Wolfram Alpha isn’t limited to purely numerical or statistical input.Eager users have found a number of hidden 'easter eggs' by entering such keywords as "to be or not to be" (which of course returns "that is the question") and "what is the meaning of life (which as any Douglas Adams fan knows, is "42").

This takes us back to our original question "is it better than Google?”.  I think this is a question that can’t yet be answered in these early stages as Wolfram Alpha and Google are clearly entirely different animals.In time if one decides to take on attributes and functionality of the other, then perhaps we will have a more level playing field on which will be able to draw a reasonable conclusion.  In the meantime, we should embrace the vast archives of knowledge that these two sites allow us to tap into.

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