Another hyped up story about the upcoming release of Wolfam Alpha:

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.
The new system, Wolfram Alpha ... takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does. ...
Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. ...
With Google now one of the world's top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.

Wolfram's chances to disrupt Google's business model are slim to none. 

First, Wolfram targets scientists and professionals, i.e. people who are already good at asking Google questions. Therefore, Wolfram's supposed advantage in being able to respond to "ordinary language" targets the wrong people. The general public might need some help in this department, but Wolfram's software performs here the worst. In other words, Wolfram attacks Google's strengths, not weaknesses.

Second, Google makes money by selling advertisement. In this regard, search is just one of, among many, Google's ad delivery vehicles. The company runs a large-scale computing platform that provides access to web pages, e-mail, media, blogs, pictures, books, analytics, and etc. The number of quantifiable leads that Google can generate for advertisers is orders of magnitude greater that Wolfram's presumably highly sophisticated, but rather niche software. At best, Wolfram will compete with Google Scholar, not Google Inc, the web advertisement giant.

Third, scalability-wise, Wolfram is going to be constrained by the number of professionals (he estimates it at 1,000) needed to update the engine's databases. Compared with hundreds of thousands of people updating Wikipedia, writing blogs and scientific articles, this seems like a very significant limitation.

In my opinion, hulu.com is a much bigger threat to Google than Wolfram Alpha. Search is important, but it is a well understood and, more importantly, addressed problem (see the 4Q diagram). 

In general, people a very satisfied with the quality of Google's search results. It's an established technology in an established market. On the other hand access to and monetization of media content is still being fought out in the cyberspace, with no clear winners emerging so far.