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Whenever a new start-up makes bold claims about its search technology, my first question is usually: what’s to stop Google from building the exact same thing?

For the benefit of all future search engines, Google has kindly proved my point by practically undermining the first public demo of Wolfram Alpha with the announcement of its own structured data search.

Just how much of a threat is this Google announcement to Wolfram Alpha’s plans? Enough of a threat that TechCrunch received a screenshot that attempts to show how Google’s data just doesn’t stack up.

OK, so Wolfram Alpha’s search data does look prettier in this example. But, here are the challenges the start-up faces:

1. What the heck is a Wolfram Alpha? I hope they re-brand.
2. Google’s data is already public, WA’s is not.
3. Google has a gazillion engineers that can work on this, WA doesn’t.
4. Google is the brand billions of people love and trust, most people won’t even be able to correctly spell Wolfram Alpha in their browser.

I’m not saying start-ups shouldn’t try, I’m just pointing out why WA (and Cuil) have the odds stacked against them.

The rest is here:

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