During its launch to the public in May this year, Wolfram Alpha has attracted millions of users (most of them were curious about how powerful Wolfram Alpha can be). The “computational knowledge engine” developed by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, is capable of computing answers to factual questions, an impressive and significant feature that no search engine has ever done before. For example, if you type ‘How old is Barack Obama?’ into the search bar, you’ll get the answer ‘48 years, 4 months, 4 days’ (at the point of writing). No matter how impressive it is, the buzz seems to have faded off.

Here comes Kngine, the newcomer that aims to jeopardize Wolfram Alpha’s goal of becoming the next leader of the Semantic Web. The Cairo-based revolutionary Semantic search engine, which launched its beta version two months ago, functions similarly to Wolfram Alpha, but much better (in my personal opinion). Unlike traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing which simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, the Web 3.0 search engine is capable of providing meaningful search results that contain a higher degree of relevance to the user’s search query. This includes the ability to display Semantic Information about keywords, answer the user’s questions, or even discover the relationships between the keywords, and link the different kind of data together.

Just like Wolfram Alpha, Kngine is capable of computing answers to factual questions. For example, if you search for ‘How old was Adolf Hilter when he died?‘ on Kngine, you’ll get the answer ‘56 years old’ almost instantaneously. But what makes Kngine stands out among the two Semantic search engines is that the Egypt site is intelligent enough to answer several “tough” questions which Wolfram Alpha can’t. For example, when I typed ‘Founders of Twitter‘ into the Kngine search bar, within 0.29 seconds, the search engine has listed the names of the San Francisco-based micro-blogging platform’s co-founders (Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey), accompanied with their photos. When I asked Kngine ‘Who is the director of 2012 (movie)?‘, besides giving me the answer (Roland Emmerich), it provides me an in-depth information of the movie such as genres, name of company, and even the names and photos of the casts.

There are a lot of words and expressions which have multiple-meanings. For example, ‘Leopard’ can either refer to the animal or Apple OS. Kngine enhances your search experience by easily discovering such words, and providing smart meaningful information about these concepts. Although this isn’t a new idea as it has been adopted by several search engines such as Rednano, a Singapore-based search engine, but at least it’s pretty useful to a certain extent.

Another feature that is worth commenting about is it’s delivery of smart and direct information to users. Unlike Wolfram Alpha, Kngine grabs most of the information from Wikipedia, IMDB, and elyrics.net. For example, a search on ‘Barack Obama’ will display meaningful information of the 44th President of The United States. This isn’t just a knowledge-based “Wikipedia + Google” search engine. You can also search for song lyrics of your favorite songs too. For example, a search on ‘Lady Gaga Monster lyrics‘ will give you the full song lyrics of Monster.

Kngine’s amazing list of features doesn’t stops here. The Web 3.0 search engine can understand queries like: ‘Brad Bitt movies‘, ‘Microsoft’s acquisitions‘ and many more.

Although some gadgets sites out there have written in-depth comparisons between the two smartphones – iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, but you can also do a simple comparison on Kngine. Simply punch in ‘iPhone 3GS VS. Palm Pre‘ and in less than a second, both phones’ specification sheets will appear right in front of your face.

With Kngine, you can search for weather conditions in a city, stock prices of a company (similar to Google Finance), or even the latest sports results. Converting from one currency to another is also possible too.

Overall, Kngine is indeed an impressive creation. You can search for or ask anything on Kngine and the answer or information relevant to your search query will be displayed almost instantaneously. If I were given a choice between Kngine and Wolfram Alpha, I’ll go for Kngine as it’s capable of providing useful and significant search results, and answering a wide variety of questions (eg. ‘When did Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower opened?‘ that even Google, Yahoo and Wolfram Alpha can’t compute answers to such questions.

Till date, Kngine contains 1+ billion of pieces of data, and features about more than 7 million concepts – 70,000+ companies, 700,000+ movies, 1,100,000+ personalties, 450,000+ locations, 150,000+ books, etc. The search engine is headquartered in Egypt and founded by Haytham A. Abd ElFadeel, a Computer Science reseacher. He plans to release the first final version of Kngine in January 2010, which will include many new features and improvement.