Go to their FAQ page, and it’s the first question: "Is Wolfram|Alpha a search engine?"
The answer is clear: "No. It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links."
So while you might type things you want to know into a web page, and the web pages gives you answers, it’s no Google.
Google is a testament to the power of librarianship.
To rank the importance of this or that professor's work, a bunch of librarians thought to look how many times that professor was cited in the literature. The more citations, the more important they were.
Sergey and Larry took this thinking and applied it to web pages – take a word, and look at how many times other people cite a page with that content – the more citations, the more important the page is.
Since Google reads every website, it can find any text that anyone cares to publish a page about.
So if you are interested in "wood pulp", "Demosthenes", "Spock", "Hannah Montana", "Nikon D80 SLR", Google can find a web page that lots of people link to, and is therefore likely to be of reasonable interest to you.
And if you are an advertiser, you can bid to appear alongside the pages that Google serves up, so that people might come to your site.
Wolfram|Alpha is a testament to the power of applied mathematics.
Twenty-one years ago, Dr. Stephan Wolfram came up with Mathematica – a tool to help scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and assorted other technical wonks plug together mathematical data, models and algorithms, to create complicated doodads of interest to that sort of person.
Wolfram|Alpha is the same basic system, with a lot more data and structure, plugged together and available online.
If you want to compare the mass of Jupiter to that of an orange, Wolfram|Alpha is your homeboy.
If you want to know the weather in London the day that Ronald Reagan died, you will find out that it was 18º Centigrade.
And if you desperately need to know where the sequence attacga appears in the human genome, this is the place you need.
But if you are an advertiser who wants to direct a click, you are not in luck.
Right now, there are no links off the site, no keywords to bid for, relatively little opportunities for sponsorship.
Wolfram|Alpha is not so hot on brands, culture, news, products, or most of the things we go to the web for.
Wolfram|Alpha is an amazing technical achievement which is going to make a lot of geeky people very happy.
But I’ll be damned if I can figure out how it is going to change marketing the way that Google has.
Craig Walmsley is head of digital for Euro RSCG 4D Digital