The Mountain Dew to Your Coke?

If Google is our generation's equivalent of Coca-Cola, then Wolfram Alpha might just be our Mountain Dew.

At least according to John G. Ekizian, public relations consultant for Stephen Wolfram, an internet guru who dropped by Harvard Law School Tuesday to demonstrate his new product, Wolfram Alpha.

The technology, set to be released later this month, performs complex algorithms to generate the answers to users' questions. From the demonstration, it looks like it's the kind of product that will save us time scrolling through pages of search results to find the information we're looking for.

But is Wolfram Alpha the newest rival to Google? More on this, after the jump.

Apparently not. Ekizian said today that the product is very different from Google, and is intended to complement, not compete with, existing websites like Google and Wikipedia.

"It won't be like Coke and Pepsi," he said. "It's kind of like Coke and Mountain Dew."

Tuesday, at the University's Berkman Center for Internet and Technology, Wolfram showed examples of possible questions and answers that the technology provides. Type in "Lexington, MA", and the product will generate population, weather, and information about nearby cities. Type in "life expectancy" of a particular age group and there will be graphs drawn to match your request. It's a "knowledge machine," according to Ekizian, and has already been called by one technology blog "really important and significant."

Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, and has already made his name in the techie world creating Mathematica, a computational program that is widely used in engineering, science, and math fields.

Photo from Mdd/Wikimedia Commons