Wolfram Alpha was unveiled several weeks ago to much fanfare. It has been called a combination of a "research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine". A recent article discussed how wolfram alpha does search in way altogether different than Google.
After watching the fascinating tutorial, I decided to try it out myself. I did not have as much success in pulling out relevant information and I have noticed that while it is excellent at doing computation, it is not necessarily the best database of the world's information. I tried a simple search for the baseball homerun record, but was not able to find the relevant statistic. At best wolfram alpha works like an advanced scientific calculator.
I don't see it becoming a large popular search engine, though. It provides relevant DATA but not necessarily relevant INFORMATION. The data is organized in a way that it can all be used in a computation. As the article points out, Wolfram Alpha is can tell you Apple's stock price, but it won't give you the recipe for an apple pie. When many users searches are based on something they want to do, or go to, such as movies, recipes, relevant articles, etc, Google seems much more suited to the task. When you have a specific quantifiable problem, then you might go to Wolfram Alpha.
I do think the real value added in Wolfram Alpha is the attractive and intuitive way in which it presents the results data. Instead of simply giving a list of relevant articles and websites, like Google, it will display graphs, data, tables, and relevant statistics to the search that would never appear under Google's Pagelink algorithm. So, while it is a very interesting and unique internet search provider, it's not going to overtake Google anytime soon...
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