Wolfram Alpha promises a new paradigm in web search

Wolfram Alpha is described as a 'computational knowledge engine'

A new British-designed search engine set to launch in two months could take a major step forward in information access technologies by offering a new paradigm for using computers and the web.

Wolfram Alpha aims to trump current search technologies, which rely on returning documents that might contain the answers to users' questions, by understanding any question and computing the answer.

London-born scientist Stephen Wolfram, who designed the "computational knowledge engine", said that the search engine does this by utilising the firm's other technological inventions, Mathematica and NKS.

"With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything, as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules," he wrote in a blog posting.

"Armed with Mathematica and NKS I realised there's another way: explicitly implement methods and models as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable."

Wolfram explained that, with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and expert human help, he has been able to create a system that "knows a lot, and can figure a lot out".

He added that thanks to "algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and some serious theoretical breakthroughs", the system also understands natural human language when used to ask it questions.

Wolfram Alpha is due for launch in May, and will be a simple web site with a single input field.