BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week in computer news, it’s all about search. The Wall Street Journal noted that Google has come under the eye of government regulators. It’s so popular, The Journal said, that it’s formed a natural, that is to say, legal monopoly. But that doesn't mean there aren't potential competitors. The tech media have been buzzing with anticipation because the world is about to get the chance to try a whole new way to find facts online.

NOVA SPIVACK: Wolfram Alpha excels at finding answers to questions that have never been asked.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nova Spivack is the CEO and founder of the search company Twine.com, not affiliated with Wolfram Alpha. He says the new Web tool to be unveiled this weekend, named for its inventor, Stephen Wolfram, isn't, strictly speaking, a search engine. It’s an answer machine. Wolfram Alpha audaciously aims to amass all the formulas and data from all the world’s sciences and systems, from physics to genetics to geography to the stock market. It will allow us to plot the paths of asteroids or compute crazy correlations between, say, the weather and the price of bread or, says Spivack, it can calculate answers to everyday questions.

NOVA SPIVACK: Let's say that you want to know how many calories there are in a particular recipe. You could just type in the recipe, you know, let's say, two tablespoons of marshmallow fluff, two tablespoons of peanut butter, two slices of whole wheat bread.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] I think I know where you’re going with this recipe.

NOVA SPIVACK: How many calories are in that? It knows the number of calories in a tablespoon of peanut butter, in a tablespoon of marshmallow fluff and in a slice of bread, and it knows the number of units of each – you know, two tablespoons, two pieces of bread. So then it can do a simple computation and then tell you, you know, this has, you know, I don't know, 1,500 calories or whatever it is.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wolfram Alpha doesn't search for knowledge, it creates knowledge.

SAUL HANSELL: There’s a huge really, actually, infinite amount of information that’s not on the Web, never will be on the Web and that you can get to much more efficiently by having a computation system that finds it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Saul Hansell, editor of The New York Times’ Bits Blog, says that enterprising designers stay up nights pursuing the vanishing horizon of the perfect search.

SAUL HANSELL: Not only is search the Holy Grail, it was the Holy Grail that nobody thought they were looking for.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Internet boils over with information that can materially change your life, but finding it is like trying to drink from the proverbial fire hose. That’s why search is the prime mover of cyberspace, the alpha and omega of the Web. A dozen years ago, when Web designers were immersed in jazzing up their home pages, Google’s great leap forward was to harness the wisdom of crowds and list search results according to how often other people accessed pages with your search words. It worked so well, Google became the de facto front door to anything and everything online. Saul Hansell.

SAUL HANSELL: If you talk to any website, one of their big frustrations is nobody goes to their wonderful home page. Everyone goes to Google and types in a query meant to get to the whatever it is deep inside their site that they want, and they go away. And the only relationship people have is with Google and the sense that Google can get them what they want.

DANNY SULLIVAN: I think if you’re looking for this unconscious thing that happens with Google, it’s more that it’s your confidante or that it’s been your best friend over time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Danny Sullivan writes about search engines on his site, Searchengineland.com.

DANNY SULLIVAN: You have continued to go over to it, tell it you’re looking for things, and it says, oh, go to do this, or, hey, I hear your pain, try that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He says Google can be the secret sharer of questions you would never ask a real person, and that builds a strange kind of loyalty.

DANNY SULLIVAN: And so, when you have a competitor who comes along, it’s very much [LAUGHS] like you have this new person who’s saying, I want to be your best friend. You’re going to be much more critical, right, ‘cause you’re already measuring them up against the first relationship [LAUGHS] you have? And if they don't measure up and they fail you, you’re like, yeah okay, I'm out of here.

TOM COSTELLO: Maybe the best friend metaphor isn't the fairest one. I think people are much, much more judgmental about their search engine than their best friend.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tom Costello is the CEO and co-founder of last year’s next big thing in search engines, Cuil, spelled C-U-I-L, which means “knowledge” in Gaelic.

TOM COSTELLO: You don't turn to your best friend constantly and ask them questions and judge them on the results, and that’s what people do to search engines. And that’s why in the search engine business traffic growth comes slowly and steadily, because you have to win over users one search at a time, and every time they come they're judging - do we get the right answer or not?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Unlike Wolfram Alpha, Cuil delivers an array of pages in response to a few keywords, like Google, but with some crucial differences. Cuil indexes and crawls far more pages than Google does, and it doesn't collect data on your searches, so it’s far more private. Most important, it doesn't rely so much on the popularity of pages. Instead, it checks websites for words that are related to your search words. The result, says Costello, is fewer irrelevant pages.

TOM COSTELLO: If a page mentions, for instance, “hip surgery,” we would look – rather than how often is hip surgery mentioned; we would look at the other terms that are mentioned, so we know whether or not the page is actually about the right content. That’s the different idea in our ranking, as opposed to just looking at popularity.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, in other words, if you’re looking up hip surgery, a page from a novel that might mention hip surgery isn't going to come up on top of that search.

DANNY SULLIVAN: Exactly, because we're going to be looking for other terms that we think are important like, for instance, arthritis or a broken hip, the other terms that people care about.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: After much hoopla, Cuil launched last summer, to lukewarm reviews. It has since made many improvements, but the world has moved on to the next, next big thing. New York Times’ Bits blogger, Saul Hansell.

SAUL HANSELL: What happened to Cuil is probably what will happen to Wolfram Alpha. They oversold themselves. They didn't come to the world and say, we're working on things that a couple of years from now might get to be really interesting. They said, we've got something that’s better than Google. That’s a pretty tall order.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But the creator of Wolfram Alpha doesn't claim it’s the next Google. He says it’s a supplement to Google. Nova Spivack merely observes that -

NOVA SPIVACK: Wolfram Alpha is essentially the greatest calculator ever built.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: There’s a fictional precedent for that, the device dubbed Deep Thought chronicled in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. [CLIP – THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY]:

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

CHILD: Oh, Deep Thought, we want you to tell us the answer.

DEEP THOUGHT: The answer to what?

CHILD: The answer to life, the universe, everything. We'd really like an answer, something simple.

[END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Saul Hansell and I tested Wolfram Alpha on an easier question.

SAUL HANSELL: So we are now at Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, can you ask what is the difference between a poodle and a collie?

[SOUND OF TYPING]

SAUL HANSELL: Input interpretation. Poole, United Kingdom, and Collie, Western Australia. And it is telling us that Poole has 150,000 people and Collie has 6,336 people. And, it is telling us, in case we wanted to know, that the distance between them is 9,146 miles.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, basically what you’re saying is that it couldn't read the difference between poodle and collie because there isn't a statistical answer to that question.

SAUL HANSELL: I think that’s right, or it doesn't happen to know anything about poodles and collies.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM: It does not happen to know about breeds. It knows about species, but it doesn't know about breeds.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Stephen Wolfram, who invented Wolfram Alpha, says it’s still loading knowledge and it tried to answer a question it read as misspelled, but it will know all about breeds in a month or so.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM: Maybe sooner. Breeds of dogs has been one that’s definitely on the pipeline. I'll give it an extra, extra push. How about that? [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] You know what? The truth is, is I really don't care. I was just wondering when one could get a grip on information that is calculateable but not instantly translatable into numbers. You can't plug a poodle into a program, you know?

[OVERTALK]

STEPHEN WOLFRAM: Right, but the concept of a thing like a city or a poodle or a type of metal or something, these are all things that have properties that Wolfram Alpha can deal with. Well, you might say, you know, you can't plug a country into a program, but you can certainly plug many properties of a country into a program, for example, the evolution of its GDP over time or the geometry of its borders. Those are all things that are readily computable.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wolfram, who also invented the computer algebra system Mathematica, says the effort to encapsulate the world’s knowledge in a computable form dates back at least 300 years, to the great mathematician Gottfried Leibniz.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM: He had the idea of even building mechanical calculators, and then trying to get the leaders of his time to assemble giant libraries to feed knowledge into this sort of mechanized system, which I think is very much along the same lines as what we've tried to do with Wolfram Alpha. The problem is that Gottfried Leibniz was 300 years too early. It wasn't realistic to build what’s needed using clockwork machines and books written in manuscript form, and so on.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Leibniz would have understood Wolfram Alpha, but what would he have made of Twitter’s search engine, which plumbs the here and now, the global zeitgeist, or Google, which delivers pages in the order of their popularity? Popularity is part of what makes Google popular, also its ubiquity and its adaptability. Search mavens say Google may never be overtaken, that it’s more likely to buy and assimilate the innovations of others. But while some allow that our passion for Google may not burn indefinitely, our passion for search certainly will, because search is addictive, because one question begets another and another, and we're never satisfied with the answer. [CLIP FROM THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY]:

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

DEEP THOUGHT: The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything –

[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING] - is –

[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING][PAUSE] - forty-two.

[STUNNNED PAUSE]

MAN: Forty-two?

DEEP THOUGHT: Yes, yes. I thought it over quite thoroughly. It it, it’s 42.

[END CLIP] [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Check out our extended interview with compulsive searcher Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com at onthemedia.org.