Do Wolfram Alpha and Hunch offer new opportunities for digital inclusion?

Searching effectively on Google requires a high level of basic literacy. Getting the right search terms; phrasing a search for best effects; skim reading the results; choosing the result that looks most relevant then finding in the web-page you are taken to the information you need, whilst assessing whether it is a good source or not.

As the paper Will Davies will be presenting to the RSA/UK Online Centre's Seminar on Social Capital and Digital Inclusion tomorrow notes, 'digital exclusion may often be a symptom of traditional literacy problems'.

But the 'next big things' on the web work differently.

Take Wolfram Alpha for example. No skimming through snippets of text to work out which pages to visit to then go on and time what you wanted. Just straight-forward factual information in response to a search.

Granted the presentation of the data still requires some interpretive skills - but it wouldn't be too far a stretch to image alternative front-ends to the data that help those with low literacy to interpret and use it. And granted too that right now it doesn't know what to do with the question 'Cheapest train from Oxford to Newcastle' but if the structured dataset on that were set free it seems quite likely that it could...

And then take a look at Hunch (in Beta right now, but invites come pretty quickly if you ask for one) - based not around searching, but around a 20-questions style model to work out what information a user needs.

And Hunch certainly appears to have an interface well suited not just to the web, but to digital TV also.

So does the future lie in creating content, and interfaces, for the next generation of machine learning-driven search and information engines that really meet the needs of the digitally excluded? Or does everyone still need to learn how to Google?