If you’ve never heard of it, Wolfram Alpha is a pretty unique search engine tool. It’s specifically designed to “compute answers” and “provide knowledge.” It essentially generates an extremely detailed report of any topic that you query. Wolfram is very popular with students, mainly because of the type of content it’s optimized for.

Wolfram Research, the company behind the popular search engine actually signed a contract with Microsoft a few years ago (2009) that integrated unique functionality into Bing. According to Stephen Wolfram, the founder behind the unique search engine, his company was also considering signing a deal with another bigwig in the industry- Google.

During an interview at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Wolfram said that he came very close to signing a deal with Google, but it “blew up.” He didn’t elaborate any further which leaves the rest of us to speculate on what he means by that.

Wolfram didn’t talk much about the deal itself, but I would assume it was similar to what Microsoft cooked up. Perhaps Google was going to implement some kind of unique functionality into their own search engine.

From what Wolfram said, it sounds like the negotiations with Google went sour, because he clearly mentioned that his colleagues don’t want to deal with the company again. That’s one of the more obvious reasons why the deal isn’t going to happen.

Besides, Google is already working on a similar project. The way Google Now processes queried information is actually remarkably similar to the same model being used by Wolfram Alpha.

Still, imagine a future where the two search engines are united and working in harmony. Wouldn’t that be something? It looks like we’ll never know though, because Wolfram’s comments just give credence to the fact that the deal isn’t going to happen any time soon, and it probably never will for that matter.

Believe it or not, Google co-founder and front-man Sergey Brin worked as an intern at Wolfram Research back in 1993. I wonder if that had anything to do with the deal going sour?

If you want to see the interview for yourself, hit up the source link below.

[via The Next Web]