The Empire Strikes Back

As we mentioned previously, Wolfram Alpha looks to push the envelope of web searching by going beyond organizing and retrieval of information to computing answers to factual questions, creating what Stephen Wolfram calls a "computational knowledge engine."

Google Labs is working on a project called Google Squared.  The idea is to add structured data to results displayed in spreadsheet form, giving context and meaning to the unstructured information freely floating about the Web.  Blogs Chris Dawson for ZDNet:

...between Wolfram Alpha, Google’s efforts in semantic search, and a host of competitors that will be popping up in this field, we may very well be on the edge of Search 3.0. This is good news for our students, teachers, and library scientists struggling to help our students get the information they want from the billions of pages of junk (and millions of pages of interest) floating around the web.

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