Digital technology of today is adding new meaning to Moore’s Law. While we can expect technology to get smarter, faster, and smaller just about every 18 months, never did I think that would mean giving a machine human-like quality.

Now, when most of you first read the title of this post, I’m sure one of two things came to mind. If you’re a movie fan ‘The Sixth Sense’ film may have been a first thought. If you’re a Techie, then the wearable gestural interface created by Pranav Mistry and his friends over at the MIT labs, may have been top of mind. Either way, the concepts and ideas drawn from these two very different media formats are similar to the logic behind Wolfram Alpha. The idea of having the ability to formulate, process, and obtain information that is beyond the normal human allowance, a sixth sense, is the premise for both the movie and the science lab experiment, and now it has moved into the world of Search.

The Wolfram Alpha web resource has been created, neither to replace or compete with Google nor to become the next new BETA engine to flop. This new search property was conceived to help expand the scientific and computational capabilities of people. Wolfram Alpha is best suited for a user wanting to know how to compute the circumference of a circle or understand quantum physics, not for someone looking for the best deal on red shoes.

How Does This Impact Search?

So, ok, Wolfram Alpha is here to solve all the world’s math and science problems, but where does it fit into the Search puzzle? I think this engine or resource or platform or however you choose to categorize it, has potentially opened the doors of online advertising for an entirely new subset of marketers. I can see school districts using geo-targeting to engage students in their district wide initiatives and events. I can see colleges and universities using this channel to run ads for recruiting. I can see pharmaceutical manufacturers, biochemical companies, and other science based companies like Monsanto or Sigma Aldrich using this engine as part of its online marketing strategy to capture traffic from another relevant source. I can also see this evolving into offering an open source feature where people can share math, physics, and chemistry problems and challenge one another, which would then turn it into a social community.

The list could go on and on with the possibilities and potential that this “answer” engine has in making LIFE and those of us who live it everyday, smarter and more eager to learn. I think it’s a great addition to search and as long as people receive and accept it for what it was intended to do, rather than measure it against “The Big 3” engines it will pan out to have a much longer life span than some of the others that came and went.