The proof of this pudding is in the eating. We'll all be testing it out with questions and seeing if we are satisfied with the results.
Its kind of disappointing that they aren't trying to parse natural language. I know that would make it a ton more complex (and possibly beyond our capacity to do), but to me that would be truly the next generation from our current flavor of search engines. If I could truly ask a question and have the computer understand what I'm talking about to return an answer, rather than just trying to match keywords. That's Wolfram's goal, I think, but I don't know if they can really get there without parsing human language.
They do parse natural language. In fact, that was one of the biggest problems they had to overcome, and is the main reason they currently have no plans for creating different versions for other languages.
"The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year."
Is "the middle of May" the result of a computation? If so, then a more precise model may take until "the middle of June".
Wolfram is a salesman first and foremost. I'll believe it when I see it.
Stephen Wolfram 'as self-important as all get-out'. Wolf has been cried; A New Kind of Science left little doubt that "expert opinions" of Wolfram's work are worth a piss-hole in the snow.