A David has just arisen to take on the Goliath that is Google: Wolfram|Alpha, a search engine which serves up formatted answers to questions rather than provide just a list of links. As of this writing, it was scheduled to go live this Monday. What is it? This ‘computational knowledge engine’ (as it calls itself) is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, the founder of Wolfram Research, whose most well-known product to date is Mathematica, a computational application that is used by mathematicians, scientists and other technicians. Wolfram|Alpha’s mission is to go beyond simply finding and listing links to Web sites, and instead to pull the needed data from those sites and provide users with the answers to their questions. In other words, it will travel through Web sites so you don’t have to. What does it do? Wolfram|Alpha gathers data based on your search terms and presents you with the answers in a well-formatted structure, using charts, graphs and other visual aids. For example, if you want to compare statistics about several different cities, you type in their names and find out that, say, Tokyo has several thousand more people than New York. What’s cool about […]