Experts predict that Wolfram Alpha could become a major rival to Google’s search engine.

Computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha, being hailed as a serious rival to Google, has gone live.

As proclaimed on the Wolfram Alpha website, the goal of the web tool is to “bring expert-level knowledge to everyone”. Unlike Google, searches on Wolfram Alpha will display answers from its internal knowledgebase rather than links to websites containing that data.

Wolfram Alpha is named after British-born Stephen Wolfram who has been developing the idea for over 30 years.

The website is still in its early stages and is currently only available in English. Further language editions will be available in the future.

In a statement on the website, the company said: “Wolfram Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.

“We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.”

Wolfram Alpha contains over ten million pieces of data, 50,000 types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for thousands of domains.

The knowledge engine can handle maths queries and plot statistics as well as providing answers to well-known facts including heights of mountains and historical information.

Wolfram Alpha will be officially launched next week.