It’s about time we see a fresh and worthy competitor to challenge the search engines. The Microsoft Yahoo merger will not make much of a dent in Google’s winning streak in search, should it go ahead. I suspect however that the next best thing is likely to put a sizable dent in Yahoo’s search share as it is set to revolutionize the search world. It may even wipe Wikipedia off the map.

Wolfram Alpha made it’s public debut on Tuesday, showing the World what it has in mind. Check out the video below:

Now this ’search engine’, if you can call it that, is not really a search engine as such. It does not search through all the websites of the World and give you a list of results in terms of websites. Instead it collects knowledge and gives you answers from the knowledge it has. And evidently the knowledge is vast.

So Google has something similar on a more basic level. If I type “time:hong kong” into Google, I will get an answer that doesn’t list a website to tell me the time. It will instead be displayed above all search results. Or I may type in “50HKD in USD” and Google will return a result for me.

Wolfram Alpha does only this. But it is highly accurate and can give you all equations, break down data and basically tell you whatever you want to know. You can listen to some of the examples given in the video above. An example would be perhaps “what is the population in Hong Kong”, and we could break that down further saying “The number of people aged above 60″. Some of the examples given are incredible.

So will this compete with the big guns Google and Yahoo? It is quite possible that this will move into 3rd place. Wikipedia may be in for a shock and will perhaps no longer be listed number one for all search queries on the net. We will have to wait and see. Either way this is the next biggest thing to hit the world of search and we will no doubt hear much about it when it comes on live in about a weeks time.