Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine
Despite what some blogs are saying about Wolfram Alpha, it will not fail. This new computational engine is not looking to be the next big search engine. They will succeed via licensing. If they wanted to become a search engine they could start by purchasing the Ask.com domain or partnering with them. Obviously, a name is only a name and they would need to execute beyond what they are currently doing but a new name would help and Ask.com seems perfect for this platform.
Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. They do not have a spider that crawls the web. They have huge databases that are full of data. Each time you enter a query a signal is sent to one of many self hosted data sets Unlike a search engine, they only search their own information.
Nobody is going to switch from Google to Wolfram Alpha and I don’t think Wolfram Alpha is looking for this. However, they would like Google and others to take notice and license the data sets and algorithms.
