The Wolfram|Alpha answer engine is going live in a few days, and we'll get to see the unbox — warts and all — live as it happens.

The service, which only a handful of outsiders have seen, officially launches next Monday, May 18. But the project organizers are doing a soft launch starting this Friday, and are webcasting their efforts to fire up all engines for the first time.

It's not as if the service needs much more hype: when they briefly and secretly opened up the door last Friday thousands of people found the opening and walked right through. Wolfram|Alpha even put up a heat map of the places where the site had been accessed, wondering in particular how it might have been possible in the middle of the Australian outback.

But the launch team discovered — and, frankly, they ought to know — that the unveiling of any major website has never been documented, at least for public consumption. So they decided to go one better: do it, and do it live.

... (W)e’ve been rather surprised that we haven’t been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience and that perhaps some of you would like to share this journey with us. We can’t guarantee that everything will go smoothly. Indeed, we fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that you’ll find it interesting to join us as we work through these in real time. Perhaps you’ll even have some advice to share.

The plan is to begin webcasting on justin.tv at 7 pm CDT Friday with preparations, and have the engine on the public web "within an hour or two." Divert power to the shields, Scotty.

See Also:

• Stephen Wolfram Reveals Radical New Formula for Web Search
• Could Wolfram|Alpha Sway Google Regulators?
• Wired 10.06: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything