Well, knowing Stephen Wolfram, the genius behind Mathematica and A New Kind of Science, it just might.  Wolfram Alpha is being pitched as a computational knowledge engine – unfortunately that’s not a very descriptive name.  It’s hard to say exactly what it will be – the impression I’m getting is that it’s user interface will strongly resemble a search engine.  Its functionality though is supposed to be above and beyond a simple search engine though.  It’s supposed to take a simple question in common language and return an answer based on your perceived needs from a database of curated knowledge.  So if you’re searching for dice rolls, it might give you some data on statistics, or even do a calculation (or set of calculations) for you.  The curated knowledge part is also very important – all of the info in the system will be verified by experts.  This of course eliminates the uncertainty of validity of information inherent in services like Wikipedia and many random sites provided by Google.

So surely there can’t be all good news though, right?  It looks like the biggest shortcoming will be in popular culture information.  So many artist, album, and track names conflict with each other and other pieces of information that it would be extremely difficult to index.  Based on what I’ve read, the creators are still working on an intelligent way of dealing with this information.  We also don’t know how it will turn out, since it’s still being developed.  With all hope though, it will be a groundbreaking change, which will benefit everyone using the internet.  So to you and your team Mr. Wolfram, I wish you the best of luck in changing the internet forever!

Wolfram Alpha is located at www.wolframalpha.com, so check it out when it goes live later this May!

(P.S.  Please don’t make Skynet.  Thanks!)