NP: John Cage, 4'33"

I've been interested in mathematician Stephen Wolfram ever since I read Complexity, even to the point where I've got a copy of A New Kind of Science collecting dust on my bookshelf. So I'm very curious about Wolfram|Alpha, the new search engine that purports to understand questions instead of just matching against search terms.

And, as someone who just recently departed the field of Search Engine Marketing, I can't help but think about what a change from term-based to intent-based searching might mean for paid search, in particular. Obviously, that's all predicated on the notion that Wolfram|Alpha might somehow supplant -- or at least steal some search share from -- Google.

If we allow that assumption, the two obvious questions are, first, does it allow for better targeting (and higher clickthrough rates) because you have more visibility into searcher intent? And second, does it make advertising campaigns more difficult because you lose that convenient unit of measure, the keyword?

Of course, the cart in front of this particular horse is whether or not Wolfram|Alpha would even support advertising. Wolfram is very, very academic, and might not be interested in monetizing something like this, although with heavy reliance on experts for indexing information, you have to figure there will be overhead costs to deal with.

From a big picture perspective, there's also an angle that the success of Wolfram|Alpha, for whatever it does to the SEM/SEO landscape, is a net positive for Google in that it gets regulators off their back about having a monopoly. That monopoly has been predicated on what you define as the market, so it's not clear what the impact would truly be, particularly if this sort of searching is more "resistant" to advertising.