Get ready to get excited about something pretty geeky. It’s a whole new way of searching. And it’s just been released in beta.

ISEdb.com reported in March about the soon-to-be launch of WolframAlpha. Since then, a whole lot of excitement, accompanied by concerns, has arisen.

If there is anything out there that has been making Google sweat a little bit, it’s WolframAlpha. In fact, Google demonstrated its insecurity by coinciding their major semantic web innovation announcements with WolframAlpha’s important events (including announcing G-Squared on the eve of the WolframAlpha launch).

Perhaps they are worried because the idea behind the new processor is that we should be expecting more from our search engines.

Just launched last month, the new search engine has been featured in the most recent issue of Technology Review, where it is hailed as being a leader in the future of search. WolframAlpha’s quest: to make knowledge computable.

Mathematician, scientist, and all-around genius (or so his awards show), Stephen Wolfram noticed that the Semantic Web everyone talks about just wasn’t going to come about on its own. So he decided to do it himself.

Using his software Mathematica, extremely popular with number crunchers worldwide, WolframAlpha has been developed as a ‘computational knowledge engine’, meaning that, using complex algorithms built in to Mathematica’s software, WolframAlpha is meant

to compute answers instead of just listing a bunch of different sources where you have to find them yourself.

It’s the kind of technology that Captain Kirk had on his Starship enterprise – ask a question and get a very intelligent, well-researched, specific answer complete with fancy graphics. Well, that’s the idea. But there are still some glitches to be worked out.

There is still much the search engine doesn’t know. As Technology Review put it, WolframAlpha is a library with its shelves half-full. A frequent search result is “WolframAlpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

It has also been burdened with complaints about its lack of specific documentation. While clicking links does reveal a variety of sources, nothing explains which source in particular provides the specific information.

Alexa reveals that after the massive traffic spike just after the program’s launch mid-May, traffic has dropped dramatically, putting it not even in the same realm as Google.

However, the search engine is still young, and time to work out bugs is on their side. Individual users are even welcomed to submit their own information, in a Wikipedia-type style; however, Wolfram maintains that the information will be handled and reviewed by his experts before it gets published.

The search engine looks to be, despite its flaws, terribly impressive. Technology Review called it “detailed, intelligent, and graphically stunning.”

Wolfram has certainly brought us far closer to the Semantic Web than we’ve ever been before – and that much closer to those Star Trek computers we all dreamed of when we were kids.