UK Search Engine Could Challenge Google

A new Internet search engine created by a British physicist could be powerful enough to challenge Google, according to The Guardian .

Stephen Wolfram created the Wolfram Alpha in an attempt to improve the current Web search capacity by addressing people's specific questions.

"Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they'd ... be able to ask a computer any factual question and have it compute the answer," Wolfram wrote on his Web site .

Wolfram claims that his search engine understands users' questions and then calculates the answers based on extensive mathematical and scientific formulas.

Currently, Google and other search engines compare search terms against billions of documents stored on their servers, and then point to the pages which are most closely associated with the correct answer.

Last summer, Cuil became the latest new search engine to take on Google, but none of the upstarts have been able to topple the search giant as of yet.