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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Don't know about you, but it seems to me that Wolfram to Google is what Google was to Altavista. A principally different search paradigm that may yield dramatic increase in a search quality. It's no longer a web search, but rather an information search.

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It seems like it fills holes that Google has rather than acts as a complete superset of Google functionality. I use Google for a lot of the queries they demonstrate, but I have to click-through and dig further to find my answer. With Wolfram|Alpha, there is no need to dig. Yet, it doesn't return "regular" ranked results, which don't require computation -- hence, it's not a superset, and not a killer.

I can see Google responding with a similar offering, especially with their impending Squares release. It'll be interesting competition flaring up in this space.

I was tempted to agree there -- but that's the thing, whatever comes along and replaces Google won't look like Google, and we probably won't even notice it happening.

I don't think Wolfram Alpha is that. I think its goal is honestly too ... computational, logical, factual ... to have the broad appeal of Google. But I don't think that because something is fundamentally different than Google means that it's not the fabled Google killer.

Come now. The average user will continue using google. This is interesting, and maybe scientists will use it, but it's not going to be of any use to the average googler.

Would love a few folk who know how this works to clue me and anyone like me in on what this could be doing in five years?

Take a DVD player as an example, if he was inclined to load the data I could put in a model number and it could show me the technical specification, picture, manufacturer etc.

If I put in two model numbers he could compare them. Could he include in the contents things like product reviews? (is the only problem a trusted source for the data?)

Or, he seemed to have a link for movies - presumably if I type the name of a movie he can list actors, year of release, sales gross etc. If I put in a band can he tell me whether they're touring, back catalogue?

Its obvious from the demo he hasn't been building something to help me pick a DVD player to buy, but does anyone know if this system is likely in the future to support this kind of thing that would be useful to the layman? because that's what might scare Google (or not if I'm barking up the wrong tree here).

I've just tried Wolfram and I would say that Wolfram is to Google as a Statistics section in a library is to Google. In other words, nobody except geeks will care.

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