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Perhaps they don't want other search engines 'learning' the questions (via phrases hyperlinked to wolfram) and displaying the answers as summary text?

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Again, the text of each image can be found in the image element's alt attribute. Since WA already uses images to make formulas easier to print out, I guess Wolfram simply wanted to reuse the code.

Turns out, Google is indexing the questions:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wolframalpha.com+inurl:i...

The "meaning of life" and "the ultimate answer" questions feature highly. But even more people seem curious about "unemployment rate in USA".

The answers are not in Google's summary.

In addition to what Scriptor had to say - I don't think those images would be a challenge for Google's OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

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