The persistent efforts, spanning years of `working in stealth' with over one hundred workers -, have finally borne fruit for scientist Stephen Wolfram! His newly-built web engine Wolfram Alpha -the "computational knowledge engine" - can figure out answers to factual questions more effectively than Google.

Though elaborate details about the new engine are still awaited; simply speaking, it operates in such a way that when users put forth factual questions to the engine, it computes meticulous answers for them.

Going by Wolfram's recent post regarding his effort, the offering appears a proprietary system which, based on spheres of knowledge, contains terabytes of `curated' data and countless lines of algorithms to characterize real-world knowledge the way it is widely known.

Wolfram says that the new engine is built on two elementary stepping stones - Mathematica and a New Kind of Science (NKS) - Wolfram adds that as a result of "a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation," the system has been made "to work!"

Wolfram has shown his offering to the search engine expert Nova Spivack, who terming the effort "almost absurdly ambitious," has also added that "it works." Summarizing his comments on Wolfram Alpha, Spivack said that the system that work wonders for formal knowledge - including all the formally definable systems, algorithms, heuristics, theorems, rules, methods, and facts in the world!