The internet tool that “fired google”, according to some experts, has been presented to the world.

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of  Stephen Wolfram a British physicist.

This free platform intents to resolve queries straight off, instead of showing web pages in reply to a query like a SE.

The “computational knowledge engine”, as the technology is known, will be available to the world from the middle of May this year.

“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime,” enounced Dr Wolfram at the presentation at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The tool calculates many of the replies “on the fly” by catching raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather condition information.

People may use the system to search for simple facts – such as the height of Mt. Everest – or crunch several data sets together to produce fresh results, such as a country’s gross domestic product.

Additional functions resolve complex mathematical equations, plot scientific figures or chart natural events.

“Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results,” said Dr Wolfram.

As a result, a lot of the data is scientific, although there’s also limited cultural data about pop stars and movies.

Doctor Wolfram stated the “trillions of pieces of data” were selected and managed by a team of “experts” at Wolfram Research, who also massage the data to make certain it can be interpret and displayed by the system.

The new tool applies a method known as NLP to return answers.

This allows users to ask questions of the tool using natural language instead of particular search terms.

Dr Wolfram said that Alpha has solved several of the problems of interpreting people’s inquiries.

“We thought there would be a huge amount of ambiguity in search terms, but it turns out not to be the case,” he said.

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