One of the main selling points of the Wolfram Alpha Web site is that it isn't a search engine; it's an answer engine: enter a question, and Wolfram Alpha returns an answer. 

To date, Google has usually been an indirect source of information: enter a search term, and Google will highlight a list of pages that most likely contain the answer you seek. But whether that answer is displayed, or whether it requires another click, has been somewhat up to chance. No longer.

Google said Friday that it will begin highlighting the answer in the search results: so, if you enter "the population of the U.S." in the Google search box, the result will display the page, but hopefully highlight the answer to your query in the accompanying snippet. In some ways, that's bad for sites like Wikipedia that might see users visiting its site for the answer to basic questions, without the need for the wealth of  background information that most of its articles provide. The specific answers are taken from Google Squared Google's tool to extract information from the Internet.
Google also announced a technology known as "rich snippets," which improves search results by including links to specific event names, dates and locations, according to Google. As an example, a user might search for "Madison Square Garden" or "The Paradise Club". With "rich snippets," that result will now turn up a list of upcoming events or shows to be held at the venue. Developers will need to peruse Google's documentation to enable the feature, however.