Now available are additional search options that allow you to filter by video, forums, reviews and perhaps more importantly by time. Google is trying to duplicate Twitter’s ability to tap into live data to spread news faster than any other media outlet by allowing for filterable results by the past day, week or year. Although not quite up-to-the minute like Twitter, it’s close and will surely only get better. Additionally, Google has added the ability to change the format of results. You can now see images associated with a page link, more text or related searches. In an attempt to become more visual, the Wonder Wheel provides nodes related to your query, which you can click through to continually narrow your search or jump to a tangentially related search. Also, the timeline view gives a history behind your related search, which can be narrowed to any given month of any given year.

But the real potential Wolfram|Alpha killer is Google Squared, scheduled to launch by the end of May. Head over to Techcrunch to see it in action. Essentially it will construct a database of factual information based on your search organized into what Google labels “squares” aka an Excel spreadsheet. Eventually, each column will be filterable. The new feature does have issues with some searches. For example, in Techcrunch’s exclusive video, the search term “spaceships” returns links to a Corvette and a missile carrier.

But more importantly, Squared will parse data from the entire Web, pulling what it believes to be factual data from pages and organizing it in an easily navigable manner. Wolfram|Alpha will depend solely on its own databases, which house a measly 10 terabytes of data. So while Wolfram|Alpha focuses on separating what it believes to be the best information into a separate database to process results, Google is taking advantage of the vastly more amount of information on the Web to compile its answers to your search.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out. Based on the preliminary data, it seems Wolfram|Alpha will still serve a niche role at this point, but Google doesn’t seem too keen on allowing it to coexist.

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.