The new search engine Wolfram|Alpha officially launched on Friday and, with rampant media coverage today, will probably experience the heaviest volume yet. Though Google shrugged off concern about the launch, the big G surely sees some competition (though I guess the fact that Google released data-compiling features during a W|A sneak peak could be a coincidence…)

W|A is not exactly in the same category of ‘search’ as Google because it doesn’t scour the web for information, but rather draws on carefully curated and prepared data from extensive databases. Instead of offering a list of web pages like Google does, W|A compiles data and presents it as graphs or side-by-side comparisons. Typing in “New York Boston” for example, will give population and elevation of both and distance flight time between the two.

I can see this filling a gap Google has—in those cases when you have a relatively straightforward data question—“How long is the flight between Boston and New York?”—and don’t want to have to mine through the airline websites that Google presents. This will likely make W|A most likely ideal for research (and homework!) and seems rather complementary to Google. For a more extensive comparison between Google and W|A, check out Tech Review’s coverage here.

Having a search engine that can generate answers for you has been something of a holy grail for developers for a long time. Though W|A still has a lot of error messages and is far from being as all-encompassing as the automated Dr. Know in A.I., Wolfram seems to have created the most adept ‘answer-generator’ than anyone else yet. And the Illinois-based team is just getting started.

I had the chance to meet founder Stephen Wolfram last month when I filmed a colleague’s interview with him. Wolfram struck me as very articulate and well-spoken, and answered carefully all the questions put to him. His enthusiasm for the organization of large amounts of knowledge was evident (and reminded me of the lead Encyclopedist in Asimov’s Foundation.)

Wolfram’s experience in large projects—the Mathematica program and the very thick “A New Kind of Science”—is his self-admitted advantage, since he has practice at cultivating the patience needed for such a huge project. (Of course, being able to self-fund doesn’t hurt, either.) Though W|A had a few errors when I saw it the first time during the interview, Wolfram was not fazed, but rather took diligent notes in the manner of a scientist tweaking his grand experiment.