The next “Google killer”, Wolfram|Alpha service from the creator of Mathematica & the New Kind of Science, Stephan Wolfram,  will be launched in next days. According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information.

Instead of searching the web for info, Alpha is built around a vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources. Alpha then organizes and computes this knowledge with the help of sophisticated Natural Language Processing algorithms. According to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).

Alpha will come in a free version, but there will also be a paid version, which will allow users to download and upload data to Alpha. Stephen Wolfram did not go into too much detail, including pricing, but pro users will, for example, be able to not just see a graph, but also download the data behind this graph for use on their own machines or in Mathematica.

The tool will kill Google? 
No, not at all, maybe it is actually wrong to call it a search engine at all (and Wolfram prefers to call it a “computational knowledge engine“). If you wanted to know what sights to see on your next trip to Moscow, for example, Alpha, from what we’ve seen so for, will not be able to help you.

Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.

We’ll see in May! 

Later Edit
A sneak video preview: