Google Killer? (Again)

The last couple of days I have seen lots and lots of buzz around Wolfram Alpha. It's been in the Times and Metro here in the UK to name just two and I have seen it all over the web.

It is a new search engine that is meant to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone", spanning all education levels from doctors to laymen and make searching for information "completely free-form".

The science behind it IS very impressive and it sounds like a fantastic idea, answering your question on the screen and not with a list of results.

If you ask a very straightforward question then it does work. I asked it how many people are in the world and it gave me an answer straight away of 6.53 billion.

If i asked it a more freeform question though, something that I randomly thought would be interesting to know, it began to struggle.

For example I asked it:
"How old is the Queen?"
"How many legs does a spider have?"
"How many iPhones has Apple sold?"
"What is the average rainfall in London?"

All of which met with "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input".

OK, so it's the Alpha version and i'm hardly expecting it to be perfect, but I thought the questions were pretty straight forward and I like to think I gave them more structure than the average person might do when they are asking questions. It just simply wasn't up to the challenge...

We do need more ways to get answers than a list of links and it's good to see alternatives emerging, I just can't help thinking that innovations in visual search (Searchme) are going to come into popularity faster with the masses...

I am guessing Wolfram will get better, as I said it is a great idea and they have certainly put in the man hours (20 years?!)... for now though I am going to stick with Google...