New search engine to use natural language

Tue, 03/10/2009 - 02:21 - NLN

British physicist Stephen Wolfram is working on a natural-language search engine that "could be as important as Google."

Wolfram's algorithms aim to understand a searcher's input and calculate the answers. Microsoft's Powerset is the only other search engine reportedly making progress toward understanding natural-language queries.

Watch out, Google. A British physicist is working on a new search engine he thinks "could be as important as Google."

Stephen Wolfram, the brain behind the Mathematica and A New Kind of Science programs, is working on what he calls an even more ambitious project that aims to not only look things up, but figure things out.

Dubbed Wolfram|Alpha, the new engine could debut within two months. Wolfram says it will know a lot, figure a lot out, and interact in natural language.