Search me!

INTERNET: Has the next Google arrived? There is both praise and criticism from the technical community for a new search engine called Wolfram Alpha. Well, it's not exactly a search engine, according to the software company that created it.

Wolfram Research calls its new tool a "computational knowledge engine" that is based on complex mathematics. It uses "its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data" to compute the answer to a query, not simply to produce links to websites.

"We're trying to do something which is emulating the way that an expert would actually answer a question," Stephen Wolfram, physicist and founder of the company, told The Wall Street Journal.

Wolfram Alpha uses complex mathematics to answer questions.

One criticism is that Wofram Alpha may be too technical for general use. Perhaps significantly, the site's logo is a rhombic hexecontahedron, a complex 60-faced geometric solid. (You can google that term, or better still, read the explanation that Wolfram provides.)

It remains to be seen whether Wolfram Alpha reaches the popularity of Google. If you're looking for results or explanations, possibly. If you're looking for links, probably not.