Watch this and glimpse the future:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/ ... alpha.html

Holy frack.

This and Bing are going to change the shape of online search. Both put more integration into the search and results presentation, relieving the user of the need to drill into each result page and put together their own summary.

Google will actually do a great deal of what these new sites do, but it's not as smooth or commonly known. Go ahead and put an equation, a phone number, a UPS tracking number into Google. It does an amazing amount of stuff beyond simple searching, but hardly anyone knows it.

My bet at the moment is that Bing will displace Google. From what I've seen, Microsoft scored one of its rare triumphs there. Wolfram|Alpha, right from the name, is too offputting and science/tech/geek oriented for mass acceptance. (Once again, engineers come up with a really kewl idea and then forget that the mass user base is not technogeeks.)

My point is that WA (and Bing, and Ask Jeeves, and the other high-integration search sites) aren't doing anything really new here. They're packaging the output in novel ways. If WA retains its academic science facade and thrust, I wonder how successful it will be over time, as the general population won't find it appealing and the university crowd tends to disdain canned answers. I've no doubt that WA will find a level of acceptance about like Wikipedia - good enough, if you're not too picky, but with flaws in its search and integration if you are an expert or other demanding user.

Success is important because at some point, these portal/tools are supposed to make their inventor owners gobs of money. (I still have trouble seeing HOW, exactly, but that's just me.) So if WA achieves its lofty goals but remains a minor player in the infosearch game, it will have few prospects for associated advertising and the scanty other ways free web sites can generate revenue.