The natural-language search engine, Wolfram Alpha will make its official debut into the search market on May 18, when it will prove just how user-friendly the service is with a mainstream audience

Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha’s creator and the brain behind the computational software Mathematica, believes his latest project has a good chance to gain traction in the crowded and highly competitive search market as it approaches results in a different way.

The engine is different from the search market giant, Google, in the way it displays the response to your queries. Rather than providing thousands of web links to pages that potentially may have the answer to your query, it uses algorithms that answer specific questions with useful and relevant information. Alpha can even answer questions like, How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?

This does not mean the end of Google- whose co-founder Sergey Brin, ironically, once spent a summer interning for Wolfram. The two products are entirely different and unique. Wolfram can’t help you find movie times, the best deal on a laptop, or a link to the latest viral video like Google can.

However, only time will tell on how well Wolfram Alpha is received by the public. Last summer, Cuil rolled out as a hyped up search engine that was considered to be a legitimate challenger to Google. After it was released, the flood of Web traffic caused its servers to crash and since then, its unique visitor count has dropped.

It appears that the way for Wolfram Alpha to succeed with the public may be dependent on delivering accurate search results as well as constant uptime.

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