Remember back about 10 years ago, back when Microsoft was king of the heap? It could not be dethroned. Bill Gates was Lord, but that was then. Today, Google is the Big Digital Kahuna. The question is, for how long?

The Google Killers are out there! You probably haven’t hard of them. Heck, you probably didn’t hear of Google back in 1998. (And today you probably don’t hear much about AltaVista or WebCrawler either!) Internet kings are made slowly. In fact, predicting the Google Killer is a foolish thing to do. So let me begin by introducing you to WolframAlpha.

Yeah, that’s a silly name for a hip, Google-killing search engine. It helps to break it apart: Wolf Ram Alpha. Kind of like Man Bear Pig, but only two animals and not three. And then there’s alpha.

You can visit WolframAlpha at http://www.wolframalpha.com/, but there’s nothing there yet. It’s to be unveiled in May 2009. (Ignore that it’s already May for a moment.)

WolframAlpha is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, the genius behind the Mathematica program, which you might not have heard of, but it’s really something. Or so they tell me.

Here is a link to Mr. Wolfram’s blog, where he discusses how WolframAlpha will work. Basically, the idea is to use a search engine — basically a computer — to locate knowledge, not just matching text.

Remember how on Star Trek they used to ask the computer a question, such as “Who were the most influential European philosophers of the 18th Century?” The computer would actually list them. But when you pose that same question to Google, you get 102,000 hits that highlight primarily the words 18th Century and European.

In fact, the top Google hit is the Wikipedia entry for Age of Enlightenment. That’s nifty and all that, but it’s up to you (the human) to cull through that information and discerne who the top philosophers were.

Yes, unlike Star Trek, the computer doesn’t really know the answer; it’s just being a fast idiot and coughing up text matches. That’s not clever, nor truly even useful. It’s that lack of depth that WolframAlpha hopes to capture.

I don’t really think that WolframAlpha will steal Google’s crown, but I do see a place in the online universe for such a valuable search engine. In fact, WolframAlpha seems to be more of a threat to Wikipedia than to Google. Time will tell.