Google has the search market share nailed. Pretty much globally. Search insiders, bloggers, analysts and experts tend to be in agreement that incremental improvements to search relevancy can only take the competition so far (or actually not very far at all). Consensus is that any serious threat to Google dominance will come from the search engine that nails the semantic intention. Semantic intention? Semantic Web is about understanding connections and relationships to attach meaning and significance. I’m going to paraphrase the best example I have seen from Kaila Colben blogging for MediaPost Search Insider. Kaila’s example is a search for “Who is Darth Vader’s son’s sister?” Type that into a traditional search engine and you won’t get the answer. You will get a collection of links that contain content that is highly relevant to the ‘tokens’ in my query. Tokens in the query string here are ‘darth’, ‘vader’, ’son’ and ’sister’. So-called noise words (so, who, a, if, etc) are stripped out or de-prioritised according to which search engine you’re using. The ability to understand and interpret the semantic intentions, generally conveyed by these ‘noise words’ has until now been the Holy Grail of search intelligence. Until that is… Wolfram Alpha.