I definitely see this driven as via corporate sales. Take a look at this article from Forbes pointing out how they might do it, but note that it also agrees with Jon’s point.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/15/wolfram-alpha-internet-technology-internet-wolfram-alpha.html

I also don’t foresee ever actually clicking an ad after getting the computational answer to a question.

But to your point seth is awesome, its cited data is now just a list of links.
Source information that I can’t copy and paste else where, cause I can’t even highlight it.
This is a problem because in their sea of links they don’t say ‘who’ specifically is on record as claiming its 4.565 million.

Thats a problem for me.
Because the way the source information is stated, its as if they don’t want us to be able to explore this for ourselves.

@Jon agree with you they aren’t likely to be able to sell ads. I do see an enterprise model here. Though maintaining a search engine is EXPENSIVE and I’m not sure how much companies would be willing to pay for a better search for their data repositories.