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In exactly five days, the shroud will be lifted from Wolfram|Alpha, ushering in a new dawn in searching the Web. Well, maybe, maybe not.  Stephen Wolfram, child prodigy and creator of the popular computational software program Mathematica, will be bringing his prowess of all things nerd to the world of search engines. And as with any search engine created by a particle physics genius, his latest endeavor is being touted as the Google killer. A bit overhyped? Definitely. Revolutionary? Possibly. One thing is clear: Wolfram|Alpha will not be a Google killer.

It will serve as what many are calling an answer or fact engine or what Wolfram himself has labeled a “computational knowledge engine.” Built on the computational power of Mathematica, it’ll probably be a damn good one: Twine founder Nova Spivak described his experience with it “like plugging into an electronic brain.” Wolfram|Alpha computes answers rather than relying on keywords and other algorithms to select Web pages that may contain your search words, so engineers, scientists, geeks (myself included), and anyone else searching for facts will most likely find this to be an invaluable resource.

As one of the lucky few who have had a sneak peak, Gizmodo has already compared Wolfram|Alpha and Google in a head-to-head battle for search supremacy. Searching for “Aspirin Tylenol,” Wolfram|Alpha returned molecular diagrams for aspirin and acetaminophen and scientific data comparing their chemical properties, such as boiling points and vapor pressure. Google’s top hit was a link to a Wiki-answers page that asked “Can you take Aspirin and Tylenol together?” and other hits linked to their effects on the liver and increased risk of kidney failure. In another test, a search by Wolfram|Alpha for “Sydney New York” returned exact distances between the two in miles, kilometers, meters and nautical miles, with a map of the optimal flight path, and how long it would take to the make the trip by airplane, as a sound wave, as a light beam in fiber and as a light beam traveling in a vacuum. It also provided local times, elevations and populations for the two cities. Meanwhile, Google returned assistance for finding flights between Sydney and New York, a list of businesses in New York City that contain the word “Sydney” plotted on Google Maps, and links to the Chamber of Commerce for Sidney, a small town in upstate New York.

Clearly, Wolfram|Alpha sports some smarts that Google doesn’t have. However, can any search engine serve as a supplement to Google? A recent article by Wired makes an excellent point: although Google portrays itself as the doe-eyed philanthropist next door, it truly is the 800-pound gorilla that has squashed one rival search engine after another and holds over 70 percent of the market share. Will it allow Wolfram|Alpha to coexist? The article continues to claim that Google will duplicate the same technologies used by Wolfram|Alpha—after the federal probe as to whether they are a monopoly dies down.

But can they easily replicate the brainchild of a prodigy who published an article on particle physics at age 16 and received his Ph.D. in particle physics at 20? I doubt it. My guess: If Wolfram|Alpha is as revolutionary as it could be, Google will do as it has done with all potentially awesome technologies and just buy it. Then it will have no chance to be a killer, rival or supplement, and merely be a component.