Alpha male: Fresh from his self-described reinvention of science, Stephen Wolfram hopes to circumvent Web search by computing answers to users’ online queries--all from his company’s databases. He launched his “knowledge engine,” Wolfram Alpha, at his Illinois control center on May 15. Credit: Roy Ritchie

On the evening of April 27 a ferocious rain raked the windows beside Jamie Williams's cubicle as the physicist sat, exhausted, immersed in the minutiae of food science. On the computer screen before him were raw tables of information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, containing data on 7,000 foods, from blackberries to beef. He and a four-person team were "curating" the data, readying it for a new kind of online search. He combed through the tabs that identified 150 properties (nutrients, calories, carbohydrates, and so on), making sure the various abbreviations were consistent and readable by computers. He organized foods into groupings to facilitate natural-language queries. A search for nutritional information on "milk" would provide an average value, for example, while "skim milk" would provide a specific answer.

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