Wolfram Alpha, announced on morning TV today and on everyone’s lips as the news got around. Earlier this week a tweet alerted me to this new kind of search engine and I watched a demonstration screencast about how it might work.The statements about “killing” Google that are going around seem, to me,  to be a bit silly. Wolfram Alpha is a different search engine to Google, and  it does not aim to do exactly the same thing. Yes, in general terms both aim give information that will answer your query, but they have a different approach as to how you find the answers to your queries. As we all know, Google, and other such search engines, refers to links to other sites related to the keyword/s used to set up the search. It is as it states, a web search engine.Wolfram Alpha is a knowledge based engine tries to compute answers for a different type of question. It returns is a summary of information that it has garnered from all over the net so it does not offer sites but displays the results to the question, very quickly. It does depend on the questioning technique and it will have to be able to understand the question, therefore the programming will have to take into account the idiosyncrasies of human language.There are a few tips on how ask questions that will yeild the best results. I have played around with some questions that have been asked by students in the last fortnight. It did not do well on some but on others.For instance “How is electricity measured?” did not come up with a result and I had to click on another link to work out the probable answer. “What is hydropower?” asked by the teacher did not yeild results but ”What is hydroelectricity?” did give me a nice basic answer. A question about carbon nanotubes also came up without an answer as did “applications of nanotechnology” It did tell me how many eearthquakes there were in Asia in the last 2 months and the rate of inflation in China, both within seconds. Searching for the element carbon also brought up