Not wanting to be called a search engine, Wolfram Research Inc., the folks behind are calling their new service a computational knowledge engine. It's akin to a fact engine, a way to look for facts or stats.

last Friday and is officially being launched today, can't tell you what's in a Denver omelette, the age of the Hubble Space Telescope, or the definition of RFID technology. Those answers are easily available using Google Search. What WolframAlpha will tell you is the population of Boston and probably your home town. It'll also tell you what the weather was in Portland, Me., on Jan. 26, 1967.

With WolframAlpha it's all about the stats ... and the facts and figures.

"Rather than just having a database, Alpha allows you to access it in a way that's not just raw data," said Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research. "Alpha will actually do the math, the computation, for you. A search engine searches for stuff that already exists. Any search engine or something that doesn't exist yet. They index things that exist. Alpha constructs new information for you. It creates new Web pages that target answers to the queries you give it."

WolframAlpha isn't designed to give you a list of web pages to look through to find your answer. WolframAlpha is designed to calculate the answer for you.