FranticFish - 12:07 pm on Feb 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

Indeed, and it does raise the question as to where the information that powers those answers is going to come from.

If Google is going to build its own answer database (like Wolfram Alpha, mentioned in the comments on Mashable) that's one thing.

However my reading is that they want to develop AI that would allow them to answer questions they weren't expecting.

If they're going to crawl the web, and use information that others have generated or collated to power their own 'answer engine' then that really does give the lie to any notion that there is some sort of 'partnership' between them and the webmasters whose information powers their results.