Take Google with Wikipedia, stuff them into a calculator, and you get the new super search tool WolframAlpha.

Launching today, it had some embarrassing gaps, and crawled. But when it’s on form, it’s phenomenal. It’ll quickly become the top destination for many number-related queries.

The brainchild of British-born maths whiz Stephen Wolfram, and backed by his US-based company Wolfram Research, WolframAlpha is billed as “a computational knowledge engine”.

Go to the WolframAlpha website, type in any query - especially one involving numbers, statistics or financial data - and it returns an answer filled with graphs,  charts and sometimes 3D illustrations.

Unlike Google, results are not based around a series of links to other sites; instead, you see a single canned response, drawn from public databases and Wolfram Research’s own databanks - a process that apparently draws together 10 trillion pieces of factual information.

WolframAlpha happily draws on its rivals, which is helpful when responses to queries like Peter Jackson provide nothing but his age and occupation, then a link to the director's Wikipedia biography. Typing swine flu draws a pretty basic response from WolframAlpha - a table numbering infections by country; to find out more, you can click a supplied link to execute a "Web search" (which turns out to be a Google search).

But I’m picking for many number-based queries, WolframAlpha will become peoples’ first stop.

Its number and data-driven approach covers all manner of areas, from health, books, movies and sports, among many others - and for some narrowly defined seearches in these areas it will become people's first stop. Typing a movie name, for example, gives you its box office and a cast list, but not links to reviews, which is what many would be after.

Similarly, searching for pizza yields a complete nutritional breakdown for a variety of different toppings. Useful, I'm sure, but more people would probably be looking for a decent pizza recipe so they can consumer some of said calories.

In the demo, WolframAlpha looks very slick.

In practice, its blunt style takes some getting used to. Ask it"who is the world's oldest person? and you get a blank response. Type oldest person and you learn that the oldest age ever recorded was Jean Louise Calment's 122 years, five months and four days  (or 44,694 days; Wolfram breaks everything down endlessly, including seconds, in this case.).

But regardless, WolframAlpha looks like it’s a better destination than Wikipedia for straightforward stats queries like What is the GDP of New Zealand or, more impressively, What is the GDP of New Zealand versus Australia and you get an impressive, graphically illustrated result.

And enter the Nasdaq or NYSE ticker for any two (or three or four or five) US stocks and you’ll see a swath a metrics comparing the companies’ share performance and financial performance. Dozens of sites offer the same metrics, and often in more customisable fashion, but for a headline comparison of companies, WolframAlpha is a handy tool.

This trick doesn’t work for ASX or NZX stocks yet, despite their information being easily accessible.

And US reviewers have noted that WolframAlpha manages to muff sports statistics, despite their ready availability. It’s knowledge of the All Blacks’ record seems to be nil.

In a many areas, you quickly come up against the limits of WolframAlpha’s knowledge at present, epecially with many queries that extend beyond US borders.

Yet it’s proven that its algorithms are very slick in areas that it does cover, and there’s no reason it can’t extend its reach by drawing in more public databases.

Sometimes a slow motion
Wolfram Alpha's test launch, scheduled for this (Saturday) morning NZ time, was delayed a couple of hours by last-minute glitches.

When it did go live, it was a touch slow sometimes - and even hung altogether on occasion - despite its 10,000 servers; presumably because interest is so high in its launch, and its teensy-weensy bit egotistical creator has chosen to do a video interview and live webcast the how thing as well. Apparently, 5000 watched the launch. Honestly, who names a medum after themselves, then is egotistical enough to live blog? [UPDATE: Right now, on Sunday morning, it's grindingly slow.] The official launch is on Tuesday NZ time.

Show me the money
So how will WolframAlpha make money? As yet, there’s no advertising (although Forbes, which accuses the site of lacking innovation in business terms, says dummy code has been spotted for sponsored links).

The site does push Wolfram Research’s Mathmatica software, which powers the site, and is available in commercial versions for financial data analysis, education and scientific research - but it all looks pretty niche, and those 10,000 servers must cost a bit of lettuce to run.

If I were Microsoft, I'd make Mr Wolfram an offer.

Microsoft needs to do something in search, and its routine makeover of Live.com certainly isn’t it.

Take WolframApha, and meld some Live.com links on the end of its results, and you would have a potential Google killer. That's priceless.

As for Google's response, I think we've seen it already with Wednesday's introduction of the more graphical Timeline and Wonderwheel results displays (the makeover also included, finally, the ability to filter results by date).

Right now, it's easy to come up against the limits of WolframAlpha's knowledge, even with US-centric queries. But when it's on form, it's extremely impressive: