Wolfram|Alpha and Google Squared raise the bar on research tools as the world undertakes a critical search on the ocean floor.

While the mainstream media has been focusing on the struggling economy and a bizarre and tragic airplane crash in the Atlantic, it has all but wiped out a week of dramatic announcements in the world of computing.

There is a certain irony in search teams from France and Brazil scouring the ocean floor looking for the black boxes from Air France Flight 447, an airplane with 216 passengers and a crew of 12 traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. It's ironic in that it truly is a case of searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack, which is precisely what people do every time they employ Google or another search engine to scour the Internet in search of a tidbit of information. As the amount of data available online continues to increase, it both raises the chance that a researcher will find what she wants while at the same time making it harder--and more time-consuming--to locate that elusive bit of information. It's as if the world's already huge oceans were rapidly expanding while searchers were struggling to map the ocean floor in a desperate effort to find the ill-fated Airbus A330.

New tools were introduced last week that promise to make searching for information not only more targeted and productive but considerably faster, despite an ever-accelerating proliferation of information both online and in corporate databases. There is also a new knowledge search technology that debuted called Wolfram|Alpha. It is an attempt to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone."

Wolfram|Alfa is not a search engine per se, according to its creators; instead, it is a "computational knowledge engine" that generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base rather than searching the Web and serving up links. Wolfram|Alpha eventually will contain nearly every fact that is known and be able to generate new information based on the interaction of those facts.

The creators are first emphasizing areas where computation or mathematics have had a larger role, but they are systematically feeding it content from reference libraries, handbooks, and such, and it currently has trillions of bits of data in it. It covers physics and chemistry handbooks--not just tabular data--but can compute from empirical formulas and then use the results to input into other computations. It includes a large amount of financial data and can produce the latest stock trades in real time.

There is an API for Wolfram|Alpha with support at the presentation, text/symbolic, and data levels. Four general areas constitute the core technology of Wolfram|Alpha: the "data curation pipeline, the algorithmic computation system, the linguistic processing system, and the automated presentation system." It uses modular server architecture similar to a modern supercomputer, so scaling it to handle more requests is resolved by having more modules.

It's all very exotic, and its creators believe it will literally be the engine that launches a thousand ships in the form of new businesses.

While Wolfram|Alpha is being tried and tested by a curious world, a more common and accepted household name, Google, introduced several thrilling if somewhat less ambitious products last week at its Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco. Among the newly released products, which for the most part are in beta, are Google Squared (an advanced type of search engine that turns unstructured data into structured content in a spreadsheet format), a new version of Google's Search Appliance (GSA 6.0 for searching billions of records in corporate databases), Google Web Elements (an easy way to incorporate Google products onto a Web site or blog), and Google Wave (a completely new form of email that merges conventional email with instant messaging with drag-and-drop conferencing features).

The company also announced Java-language support in the Google App Engine to provide developers with an end-to-end Java-language solution for building AJAX Web applications. Also announced was the second phase of the Android Developer Challenge to reward developers for building innovative and useful applications for the Android mobile phone. (The overall winner, to be announced in November, will receive up to a quarter-million dollars!)

As of last week, small-business owners will be able to control how they are perceived and located in an online search with Google's new dashboards in its Local Business Center. The company also enhanced its Custom Search AJAX gadget for Blogger. Google had a few more frivolous products it announced that might be worth mentioning in another publication for no other reason than to emphasize their silliness in an era of war and stagflation--OK, how about a compilation of celebrity home pages called iGoogle Showcase? But the one Google announcement that was at the same time upbeat but not silly was one that reported how much money the company earned during the first quarter: Wouldn't $5.5 billion in sales put a grin on anyone's face? Oh, sure, growth was down, but revenues still were running 6 percent ahead of the same period last year.

Clearly, the world moved forward last week in the realm of search technology, since search engines and what they can do represent a multi-billion dollar industry that is steadily growing. The Web is where business is happening these days, and whoever can tame it and turn the vast amount of information it contains into a huge data warehouse will be generously rewarded. Meanwhile, the world is understandably focused more this week on the search for its lost kin on the ocean's floor than on promises of the benefits of new search technology online.