Wolfram|Alpha, as the new engine is called, is not a search engine in the sense of Google or Yahoo. It does not go through the millions and millions of pages it has indexed and give you what its algorithms say is most likely to be the best match for the keywords you typed into the query box. Instead, it can parse the query you input in natural language, and answer that query- if the elements are in its curated database.
Google doesn't make judgments on the quality of data in the matches it gives you to a search. If it indexes information written by someone who is ignorant of the facts, the results are still going to pop up in your search. Wolfram|Alpha has had about 100 people working on validating the data and equations they put into the engine for nearly ten years, and recently the number of data curators jumped to 250. Wolfram estimates it may take a thousand to evaluate and feed data to the engine in the future, to start making inroads on the areas the engine does not cover and to deal with new information.
Unlike Wikipedia, not everyone will be able to go in and enter data, but there will be web forms to request material be added. And unlike Google, not everything published on the WWW that can be indexed will find its way there either. You also will probably not find 300 different answers to the same question, because the material is curated, not popular opinion.
Chances are that someone interested in pornography will not get results. I have no idea if he intends to put genealogical material into Wolfram|Alpha. It actually might make it the engine of choice for genealogists, amateur or professional if he did, because their answers would be so much more precise than Google. On the other hand, Google is likely to keep indexing every ancient document newspaper and microfiche that it comes into contact with, so some offhand reference to an ancestor will still be more likely to turn up somewhere on Google- if you have the patience to go through the 1000 possible matches Google gives access to for every search.
