Stephen Wolfram is a mathematician and physict extrodanaire. And now he's start a search engine that many people think will be the next big thing (and maybe even a Google-killer).

Mashable had a recent story on the new search engine, Wolfram Alpha - which is not up quite yet and has a May 18 date for opening up to the general public. And Search Engine Land ran storys on April 28, May 1, and May 7.

Wolfram Alpha will be a little different than most search engines. It is a "fact engine" evidently designed to give you information instead of (or in addition to) web addresses. When exactly would I use Wolfram Alpha? Adam Ostrow at Mashable says this:

To answer this question, Wolfram Alpha has an "examples" section with about two dozen different sample uses of its technology. Some of these examples are really heady, academic stuff - like the calculus you probably don't remember from college. Others are more practical, like entering in "San Francisco to Tokyo" and getting data on how many miles apart they are, the projected flight path, and current local times. Meanwhile, if you ever wanted to know what time the sun rose and set on the day you were born, type in your birthday and Wolfram Alpha will tell you (and also let me know that I'm approaching my 10,000th day on earth!).

A academic fact engine. It will be interesting to see it when it comes live...