zlacker

Google sort of has a preprocessor that does stuff like this. Probably not as much as Wolfram.

You can see it when you search Google for things like:

"What time is it in Las Vegas" (notice that it knows, and it also knows that you probably mean Las Vegas NV but might mean NM, and that Las Vegas NM is smaller)

"MSFT" (e.g. a ticker)

"Who is the president of France"

"16 USD in GBP"

From the stories, it SOUNDS like Wolfram can answer a lot more of these kinds of queries than Google, which makes me think that the best way to use a technology like this is to sell it to Google to plug in as their pre-search pre-processor to replace the simple ones they've already developed.