Anyway, I think this has been well hammered home by now - excpet the media are still plugging at the theme (as I keep saying I'm convinced that is Google's doing and very clever of them too :))

One thing that has occured to me is that we were wrong to compare it to Wikipedia too (which I spent weeks doing... :( oops). WA is certainly not in any state to compete with WP either, yet; when you consider the wealth of information available on WP.

WA is really an academic and research tool: they have got some good hype from the "vs Google" and "vs Wikipedia" media coverage but I suspect that it will die off and wont last 6 months. It will have it's uses (if I were a student/academic/journalist etc. I imagine it would become as useful as Google and WP to me!) but.. well.. that's it...

And how do they monetize it?

So much of our mainstream-facing tech media are infuriatingly bad! What can we do about this? Maybe David Pogue should set people straight.

Definitions aside: If Alpha works, it -will- impact how people use Google. If people change how they use Google, it -will- impact Google.

What percentage of Google queries do you think might eventually become WA queries? I'd say easily < 1%. I see the two as very complementary, not really competing.

They got press because everyone loves talking about a Google killer. Freebase killer just doesn't get you the same type of hype.

Was the hype created due to:

a) Wolfram knew that people would talk more about a google killer and positioned it this way. b) The press mis-interpreted what the product did and wanted it to be a Google killer, even though it's NOT. c) A combination of both.

“It does at first glance look like a normal search engine, but in fact we have 10,000 computer processors behind the scenes working out an exact answer. It will really change the way we get our knowledge, and we hope it will change the way people search online.”