I just read the wired review of the Wolfram Alpha search engine on http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/wolframalpha-fails-the-cool-test/. They follow an opinion that I've read quite a lot - that Alpha is not going to be serious competition to Google.
Now that I've tried Alpha - I don't think competing with Google is the point really (independently of how Wolfram is trying to position the system himself, I guess there's some PR involved as well).
I agree that Alpha is not very useful as a general purpose search engine. It does different things, for example specify and visualize relations between things. For example, it allows you to compare things. "Amsterdam vs. Berlin" tells you that the number of people living in the metropolitan areas of both cities is quite similar (3 vs. 4 million), and that the flight time between the two cities is about 40 minutes. As people start trying Alpha more, I suspect that they will find a lot of uses, even ones unintended by the creators at this point.
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