The development of a new search engine that uses natural language processing technology could be as important as the launch of Google, it has been claimed.
British physicist Stephen Wolfram owns a company that is building a search engine which computes answers to users' questions rather than crawling the web and looking for pages that match certain keywords.
The Wolfram Alpha engine will be capable of calculating the answers the factual questions such as 'What is the location of Timbuktu?' or 'How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?', according to Nova Spivack of Twine, who has seen a demo of the service in action.
"It is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose," he explained.
In a blog post on his company's site, Mr Wolfram suggests that explicitly implementing methods and models, as algorithms and explicitly curating all available data could be the key to using search engines to work out "something new" rather than "only answer[ing] questions that have been literally asked before".
The search engine is set to launch in May this year in the form of a website at Wolframalpha.com.
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