I predict it doesn't obsolete anything except for power searchers and data researchers.
People are still going to type "how many calories in a big mac" into Google and get specialized sites that answer those questions fine. I don't think they'll go to WA when they have a habit and good success rate with getting those casual answers on Google. I think professionals and power users may use WA in cases they know it will give them great responses, but I don't see it changing many casual user habits.
What would be interesting is if WA actually caches search results and makes them indexable by other search engines like we do with bug.gd (which is similar in the sense that bug.gd is a specialized search service). This proves to create a tremendous amount of traffic and could make the provided/refined content much more likely to obsolete those niche sites.
I don't know about that. I think users will catch on. Think about Weight Watchers, for example. I can get a whole nutrition label for the lunch I just ate in one place at Wolfram alpha. With google, I have to add it up...
I also think users will catch on. Maybe not immediately, but google and wikipedia were also just for power users at first. The benefit is so great, and it is so easy to use, that people will talk about it on forums and explain how it works. They may not at first use it as their general knowledge tool, but they will use it for the information they want most.
People are still going to type "how many calories in a big mac" into Google and get specialized sites that answer those questions fine. I don't think they'll go to WA when they have a habit and good success rate with getting those casual answers on Google. I think professionals and power users may use WA in cases they know it will give them great responses, but I don't see it changing many casual user habits.
What would be interesting is if WA actually caches search results and makes them indexable by other search engines like we do with bug.gd (which is similar in the sense that bug.gd is a specialized search service). This proves to create a tremendous amount of traffic and could make the provided/refined content much more likely to obsolete those niche sites.