Wolfram|Alpha is a new type of site

Is it a search engine? Well, not exactly. It won't replace Google or Yahoo! for most applications.

The site, which went live last week and has been the buzz of the computer world, calls itself a "computational knowledge engine." Instead of just linking you to other web sites, it tries to search for answers.

It can work math problems -- not just simple arithmetic but graphing equations.

It can compare statistics about two things or places. If you enter "Shelbyville, TN" and "Tullahoma, TN" in the search box, for example, you'll get comparisons of the two cities' populations, the mileage from one city to the other, and so on. If you enter two publicly-traded companies -- let's say, NewellRubbermaid and Tyson Foods -- you get detailed comparisons of their stock prices and other financial information.

If you enter a date -- for example, the date you were born -- it will tell you how many weeks, years or days have passed since that date, whether there were any notable events occurring on that date, the time of sunrise, sunset and so on.

There's a link at the bottom of each results page that allows you to click through and see where the information came from, and another link that will allow you to save your search results as a PDF file.

Creator Stephen Wolfram says he's been working on this type of engine for years, but only recently has the computing power to operate it been available. The site claims to have more than 10 trillion pieces of data and more than 50,000 types of mathematic algorithms and models.

The system is not perfect, and I'm certain that its quirks and capabilities will take some getting used to. After seeing me compare Shelbyville with Tullahoma as described above, my editor suggested comparing the UT Volunteers with the Florida Gators. But either the system doesn't have sports statistics or we weren't phrasing our query correctly. We could not get Wolfram|Alpha to understand our query.

How you word your query makes a difference. I tried "u.s. dollars kenya shillings" and got nothing, but when I tried "convert u.s. dollars to kenyan shillings" I got just what I wanted. It will probably take me, and perhaps others, a while to get used to what query formats get the most effective results.

The site's mission statement is, ahem, somewhat broad: "Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything."

Set your goals high, I always say. At what point do we need to ask John Connor to form a resistance movement?

In all seriousness, this is an intriguing project, and it will be interesting to see how it develops and some of the ways that people begin to use its capabilities.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.