Wolfram Alpha never was supposed to be a Google competitor. I'm not sure where you got that idea, but it seems to be a common misconception. It mostly takes you

Wolfram Alpha never was supposed to be a Google competitor. I'm not sure where you got that idea, but it seems to be a common misconception. It mostly takes your query in natural language and does computations on it, but also has various sources of facts and figures to incorporate into the calculations where applicable. Although there is a little bit over overlap in that Google tries to show information about the terms you searched alongside web search results, and will also do some computations (nothing compared to Wolfram Alpha though), they are not the same thing at all.