In Knowledge management courses one learns the evolution of inference: from arbitrary data which is processed to create information which in turn is processed to produce knowledge and knowledge is processed to create wisdom.
Search in its first decade was more of information retrieval, i.e text or keywords based syntactic search using algorithms such as the page rank to retrieve possibly relevant information from random sets of data. I had a chance to watch the live demonstration of wolfram alpha and realized that this would create a whole new era in search engines.
An era of knowledge or semantics based search engines, with high levels of information processing and greater relevance on search results. Alpha could quiet possibly be the first step towards Singularity.
The wolfram alpha demonstration video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TIOH80Qg7Q
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