John Gapper, the FT’s chief business commentator, says that Wolfram Alpha’s structured database poses long-term questions about the usefulness of internet search:
If all the data on the internet are simply too messy to be analysed and structured, Google will be unable to produce a service rivalling Wolfram Alpha in clarity and reliability.
This would not spell the end for Google and other search engines. But it would mean that search itself – on which we rely to map the internet – had bumped up against its natural limits. Let battle begin.
