Having seen some of the talk about Wolfram Alpha and subsequent discussion about whether or not it's a "Google-killer", over hyped or whatever, it seems to me that a few things have got lost in the hubbub.

The way Google is going, it's going to end up falling on its own sword. Honestly, it has so many half-done applications on the go, like books and apps and they spend so much time doing something that would be interesting if it had any interest to non-US citizens that in the not-too-distant future we're going to lose interest and move on to the next newcomer.

Nearly every other search I do on Google sends me to Wikipedia anyway, so I really ought to set things up so that I get redirected there automatically if it comes up as the top-ranked result.

WA looks really interesting and although it's applications may be a little more esoteric than what would be normally classed as mainstream search, the fact that it will make this kind of knowledge mining open makes me think that if enough of it filters into the mainstream it could snowball. Imagine if Wikipedia articles start using Wolfram Alpha search queries as their citations? I can see some of the business and statistical analysis you see in newspapers and journals coming off as imitators rather than originators - How are they going to feel about this?

These are the kinds of questions I look forward to seeing answered over time and I would love to see the sort of data that the Wolfram Alpha engine could output if other corporate or scientific organisations were to use it to analyse their data. It's possible that this new kind of query could well exceed the hype (imaginary or otherwise).