There are a few staples in movies set in the future.  You have your standard flying car, eccentric jumpsuit attire, and somewhere there’s a super-computer that has the answer to anything and everything you need.

Well it goes without saying that those are hardly mainstream things in the present date – but the super-computer idea seems to lend to the concept of a new web-based system that’s now live on the internet.

It’s called Wolfram, and it’s more of a computation knowledge engine rather than a search engine.  The difference is Wolfram aims at giving people direct answers to their queries rather than produce a list of websites where they may (or may not) find what they are searching for.  Let’s say, for example, you search “Weather Kelowna” on Wolfram.  The engine will then give you the last recorded weather conditions, a graph showing how the temperature has gone up and down over the last week, plus historical temperatures for the current date over the last 30 years.

The first thought I had was how this engine will affect Google’s domination of information searching online.  But Wolfram says they’re offering a different product – one that can answer specific questions with definitive answers.  Wolfram can solve complicated math equations, give you stock comparisons, nutritional value of foods… you can even enter a sequence of musical notes, and the engine will display the notation and the corresponding keys on a keyboard.

In contrast, it doesn’t seem to come up with anything if you search for more abstract things like pop culture.  If you enter “Britney Spears” into Wolfram, nothing will come up.  It’s designed for very specific queries.

The alpha version of Wolfram is online now.  Now if we can only get fully-involved voice interaction between us and computers, then we’lll be able to check one more thing off our list of  things to accomplish so our world matches that of futuristic movies.

Click here to check out Wolfram.

Below is a video from CNET, a popular tech review site, which shows how Wolfram stacks up against Google - they show a slew of examples that demonstrates which engine would be appropriate for what query.