if Wolfram Alpha gives you that information quickly Scaling will be a problem. It's doing more work than google, but without their datacentres, parallelization

if Wolfram Alpha gives you that information quickly Scaling will be a problem. It's doing more work than google, but without their datacentres, parallelization techniques or incremental experience. Being fast was at least half of google's success. (I agree it's not competing with google; it's just an example of scaling well.) But, on Google, did you know they acquired http://www.gapminder.com http://www.gapminder.com ? And, if they get mobilized, why couldn't they follow where Wolfram has led - but with faster results?