Despite a lot of media coverage about a potential new competitor to Google, the newly launched WolframAlpha isn't really a search engine. According to its creator, it's a computational knowledge engine.

Unlike Google and other search engines, WolframAlpha doesn't indiscriminately trawl the Web for information whose sources can range from scholarly journals to the rantings of lunatic bloggers. According it’s FAQ page: "It can only know things that are known, and are somehow public. It only deals with facts, not opinions."

Rather, WolframAlpha performs computations from its own internal knowledge base, more than 10 trillion pieces of information sourced from thousands of official websites, libraries and academic journals, and checked by experts.

Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard and the co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, describes it as a “computable almanac.”

Don't take our word for it. Experience WolframAlpha for yourself. If you have trouble wrapping your Googled mind around this non-search engine, visit the examples page for suggestions on how to take advantage of this new information resource.