The search is on

摘要

It is the curse of every internet search engine to be compared to Google, master of the universe and supreme ruler over two-thirds of such searches. Since newcomers never measure up to the breadth and depth of the billions of pages that Google has indexed over the past decade, most of these comparisons end with an easy win for the incumbent. Pretenders to the throne, nevertheless, keep appearing. The latest, to be launched on May 18th, is Wolfram Alpha. It is named after its inventor, Stephen Wolfram, a British prodigy who earned his PhD in physics at the tender age of 20 and made a fortune from a calculation and graphing software package called Mathematica-and who raised eyebrows when he proposed, in a self-published tome in 2002, that the entire universe is but a giant calculator that has been running for billions of years.