They seem to be going about the same task in two different ways. Alpha is built essentially by having an army of experts massage the data, and input it to a specially designed database. My guess is google will just apply what it knows about search to its newly available data, without messing around with it.<p>I'm suspicious of Alpha's ability to live up to its hype, unless there's significantly more to its inner workings than I'm aware of. It almost seems like a brute force solution to the problem.