Scientist Stephen Wolfram has built a new engine, called Wolfram Alpha, that apparently can compute answers to factual questions more powerfully than Google.

Wolfram has just posted about the effort, which has taken years of working in stealth and involves more than a hundred workers. He explains the basics of how his “computational knowledge engine” works: You ask it factual questions (such as “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?”), and it computes answers for you.

Many details about the engine, scheduled to launch in May, have yet to be released. However, Wolfram has shown it to search engine expert Nova Spivack. In a long post, Spivack calls the effort “almost absurdly ambitious” but concludes that it works, and claims that the engine has the potential to touch our lives as deeply as Google.

The engine doesn’t return documents that might contain the answer, like Google does, and it isn’t a giant database, like Wikipedia. Nor does it resort to natural language to return documents, like Powerset does. Rather, Wolfram (pictured left) has created a proprietary system based on fields of knowledge, containing terabytes of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms to represent real-world knowledge as we know it.

You ask it questions in a bar that looks very much like Google’s search bar, but it uses natural language to understand your question or even abbreviated notation. It then provides detailed answers.