Not sure that matters. This is how these sorts of things work: Massive publicity at launch/open-beta, then a major drop-off as people realize "Oh, this app is

Not sure that matters. This is how these sorts of things work: Massive publicity at launch/open-beta, then a major drop-off as people realize "Oh, this app isn't the Jesus-app the PR made it seem like", then a gradual, permanent build-up as you slowly iterate and improve your site. Furthermore, let's get rid of "Google-killer" as a metric. If Alpha can exist in a separate niche and be a useful service to people and make itself money, it's a win. It doesn't have to beat Google all-around to be useful to people or to make money. We live in a ADHD society. Our 24-hour cable news and blog-centric Interwebz demands that things happen way faster than the real world works. The way people today make it sound, Wikipedia went from launch to "beating Britannica" in a few weeks, when in fact it took several years. Similarly, things like Wolfram Alpha are going to take years to go from launch PR as a "Google-Killer" to actually killing Google. The way our news system works, it expects news stories to unfold over hours, not months, and to be world-changing, not merely big.