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Bing To Use Wolfram Alpha Results
angry tapir writes "Microsoft is rolling out some enhancements to its Bing search engine, including some that rely on computational information delivered by Wolfram Alpha. That means that people will be able to search for some complicated information, and the search engine will be able to compute the answers. In a blog post, Tracey Yao, program manager, and Pedro Silva, product manager at Microsoft, give some examples."
brb, dividing by zero on bing
Anybody want my mod points?
Been using Wolfram-enhanced search already - and without the b*** crap.
What else ya got...
A clock has at least two hands depicting the hour and minute of the day. If stopped, it would appear that the clock is useless, but twice a day the clock tells the current time perfectly. What matters most is that you look at the clock at precisely those two moments to tell the time. Otherwise the tool just doesn't work as you'd expect it.
So when you take two tools that aren't very good, sometimes you end up with something that might be useful. But then again, just because you have two hands doesn't mean you're going to end up doing something useful. One hand could be occupied or paralyzed or otherwise out of commission. The other hand could be gimpy or not your favored hand or even cut off entirely if you lived in Saudi Arabia.
What I'm trying to say here is simply what you all are already thinking. Who is actually using Bing? Furthermore, who is actually using Alpha? These two useless hands working together just makes it easier to forget them both altogether.
i think it's a valid question. netscape went from total market domination to nothing in a few years. granted MS pulled from under handed moves to make it happen that would be a LOT harder to do this time around, the scene is set the same. google innovates and takes market by storm, MS puts out a few non starters, eventually refines it's product to take the lead.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So far I haven't been terribly impressed with Wolfram Alpha.
For example, searching for the price of oil in non-US dollars results in a US dollar timeline multiplied by the CURRENT exchange rate of that foreign currency, not in the historical timeline. It's like Alpha is having a stab at an answer, but isn't smart enough to know when it's answering the question wrong.
It will be interesting how Bing presents Wolfram Alpha and whether it removes the inherent design flaws in it. There is an insightful but long article about the problems here - wolfram alpha and hubristic user interfaces. Two good quotes from which are:
Hype also generates funding because it generates exaggerated sales projections. For instance:
"What Wolfram Alpha will do," Wolfram says, "is let people make use of the achievements of science and engineering on an everyday basis, much as the Web and search engines have let billions of people become reference librarians, so to speak."
[...]
It could do things the average person might want (such as generating customized nutrition labels) as well as things only geeks would care about (such as generating truth tables for Boolean algebraic equations).
Generating customized nutrition labels! The average person! I just laughed so hard, I needed a complete change of clothing.
Dr. Wolfram, may I mention a word to you? That word is MySpace. If there is any such person as this average person, she has a MySpace account. Does she generate customized nutrition labels? On a regular basis, or just occasionally? In what other similar activities does she engage - monitoring the population of Burma? Graphing the lifecycle of stars? Charting Korean copper consumption since the 1960s? Perhaps you should feed MySpace into your giant electronic brain, and see what comes out.
and
Google is not a control interface; WA is. When you use WA, you know which of these tools you wish to select. You know that when you type "two cups of flour and two eggs" (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram's giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead.
So the giant electronic brain is doing an enormous amount of work to discern information which the user knows and can enter easily: which tool she wants to use.
When the giant electronic brain succeeds in this task, it has saved the user from having to manually select and indicate her actual data-visualization application of choice. This has perhaps saved her some time. How much? Um, not very much.
When the giant electronic brain fails in this task, you type in Grandma's fried-chicken recipe and get a beautiful 3-D animation of a bird-flu epidemic. (Or, more likely, "Wolfram Alpha wasn't sure what to do with your input." Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!) How do you get from this to your Nutrition Facts? Rearrange some words, try again, bang your head on the desk, give up. What we're looking at here is a classic, old-school, big steaming lump of UI catastrophe. ....
The task of "guess the application I want to use" is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram's guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user's mind. God can do this, but software can't.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
While this is interesting and possibly useful, it seems to me there's nothing stopping Google from turning around and doing the exact same thing. Wolfram is unaffiliated with either party as far as I know and certainly wouldn't mind getting exposure on the bigger of the two search engines as well.
And hey, I already do multiplication and find constants in my Google search box, it might be nice to do integrals and whatnot as well! In the meantime, if I have a specific enough question I'll just go directly to Wolfram's site to ask.
Microsoft's latest rebranding of their failed search engine has lower marketshare now than when it was released.
It has lower marketshare than last year before it was rebranded with the new stupid 'bing' name.
Microsoft is so desperate they are resorting to paying the distant second place search engine Yahoo to use Microsoft's own last place search engine.
"eventually refines it's product to take the lead."
Yeah, that's the story you want to believe. Too bad Reality is fucking it up.
Bing to use google results!
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
For very narrow queries, where you already know ahead of time Wulfram Alpha supports it, you can get useful structured information out of it. For example, if you look up a first name or surname, you can get information on popularity and geographic distribution and such. But the only time I've ever gotten useful information like that is when I already knew that it supported a particular kind of query. That's less like a search engine, and more like just querying a database. There have always been special-purpose databases on the internet where you can look up specific information, once you know that such a database exists for a particular kind of fact. What Alpha utterly fails to do is answer any useful proportion of queries without already knowing in advance exactly what you need to query and what syntax to use when doing so.
And yes, I've seen Wulfram's talks on it, and they're crap. He presented via videoconference at IJCAI IJCAI 2009, which he only got into because of the hype (sure, it's blind review, but it's hard to have blind review of a Wulfram Alpha paper that identifies itself as such in the paper), and there was no technical information at all, nor AI advances that weren't already done by like the 1960s (the AI advance in question is "querying a database").
Maybe Bing has something up their sleeve, but I'd bet on it being more hype.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That will be the number one Bing search result when asking the question "Who is the smartest man in the whole wide world?"...
So Microsoft wants to compute 2^2^2^2^2 because Google can only do 2^2^2^2? Yeah right, that will help them get more users.
...Wolfie needs Mula.
Table-ized A.I.
Wolfram Alpha is well known to badly guess what you are trying to do, and has plenty of graphs and charts. Now add a liberal amount of Microsoft flavoring to it, and you have a cross between Clippy and a really bad PowerPoint presentation... let's hope Microsoft never tries to help "improve" WA.
My webcomic
Can it tell us the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
bing says 2^2^2^2^2 = 65536
google says 2^2^2^2 = 65535
Which one is right??
How can the suckiness of Microsoft be reversed? It said:
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER
This wolfram thing might be working out after all.
THL phish sticks
And the results will be presented by ...Clippy.
When will Micro$oft realize that most users don't WANT Microsoft to do their thinking for them? Just get out of my way and do what I say. Like, I dunno, maybe Google?
In that the current google search is so good for the majority of users, that they are trying to grab at a few disatisfied straws. I can't really think of a way google search fails me, but perhaps if the results were presented a different way, I could see the clear-cut differences and improvements.
I think text search is pretty much there. The one thing I would appreciate is a better image search, and not relying on text of the image name, but being able to describe it, or sketch a rough outline, and for a search engine to recognize the content to some degree.
Beat that Google Muhahahahahaha
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
LOL. I'll bet a dollar that this is more or less how the two go about creating a new standard in hype engines.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Why are you so hard on W|A? Wolfram Alpha answers LOTS of extremely important questions!
Query: What is the speed of an unladen swallow?
Answer: "there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)"
Query: What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
Answer: 42
Query: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Answer: Not sure, but wherever she is, it isn't here.
Query: When is judgement day?
Answer: "2:14 am EDT | Friday, August 29, 1997"
Query: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound??
Answer: "No. Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound."
Query: Can entropy be reversed?
Answer: "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
Query: who would win in a fight: pirates or ninjas?
Answer: "The answer remains an ongoing debate which Wolfram|Alpha is not in a position to arbitrate."
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
How long will it take Microsoft to try to patent complex computational searches?
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
What can a search engine possibly compute anything other than the ridiculous 2^2^2^2...?
Who would type that question to a search engine anyway? No, no, Microsoft is confused, you use Mathematica 7.0 for that kind of computation.
The best today's idiotic search engines could possibly hope to do is to add/subtract some numbers, provide unit/currency conversions and that's all. Google is already doing all that.
Unless Bing servers are some clever cousins of HAL, adding some funky math skills to them won't do a bit of a difference. It's a loooong shot before the search engine actually gathers unrelated information and connects it to the actual query, doing some useful computation in between.
Sorry Microsoft, this doesn't fly.
There's plenty of room at the bottom! Richard P. Feynmann
Bing may incorporate some Wolfram Alpha functionality - but if you "search the web" from Wolfram Alpha's website, it sends you to Google.
#DeleteChrome
Simple query of a well-known statesman. Google gets it right with its very first response. Bing doesn't seem to know what I want. Alpha doesn't have a clue.
Google 1 - Bing 0
Bing and Alpha have a lot of catching up to do. And Google doesn't blink even when I get the spelling wrong as in "Winston Chrchill's Father"
Wolfram Alpha is an interesting research concept but really not a product thats even remotely ready for daily use. There are some areas where online search could be improved and where Microsoft could be better than others. For example, why not create an error message / log message search function ? That alone would drive people to Bing in droves.
Microsoft should stop and think about what information they have themselves thats interesting and how they can index it for easy use. Right now their own support sites are a total nightmare because of their utter crap of a search function.
HTTP/1.1 400
Its interesting, I'll give it that much.
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
We've combined Bing and Alpha and you get: Bleh!
Fairly suprised at how good that Wolfram database is. Typed in "what are all your base?" and it correctly replied "Belong to us".
Memetastic.
How many roads must a man go down before he becomes a man?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+is+babby+formed
They need to do way instain search
If I glance around the vast undergrad computer labs at my university, it's fair to say the majority of people use Wolfram Alpha in some form. It's a very powerful tool to augment our normal calculators, especially if you need to do conversion between SI and other units, or if you need some value that doesn't come to hand quickly (e.g. atmospheric pressure at 1254 metres, density of some fluid, etc.). It's also very helpful for checking your equations as Alpha reformats in an intuitive manner so that something like ((43+(58/8)*84)^2)/(78848)^(1/2) looks much nicer and is easier to check if something is wrong.
The raison d'etre of the natural-language interface, stated baldly, is to create a usable tool for stupid people who might be confused or intimidated by a tree of menus. The market of stupid people is indeed enormous. The market of stupid people who like to use data-visualization tools is, well, not. (And since the interface is not in fact easy but actually quite difficult, it achieves the coveted status of a non-solution to a non-problem.)
That's bad because it's Microsoft. LINUX ROCKS!!!!
That's kind of the whole point. This isn't a show-stopper, it's a show-starter. It's going to force similar innovation from Google, which means that everyone wins.
Shouldn't Wolfram Alpha do that? After all, that's what it's supposed to do over and above just a search engine.
You know, calculate.
to check my calculus homework. It is much easier to get transforms there than in Matlab...
As if Bing users had the brains to even spell "math" correctly. Because if they had the brains, they wouldn't use Bing in the first place. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I already get Wolfram Alpha results in my Google searches with the "Wolfram Alpha Google" add-on. Plus, no ads...
This type of searching is going to be as annoying as that dancing paperclip. The problem with Microsoft is that it's run by people who don't really want to do any heavy lifting. So while you are feeding pablumized information to a general public I will search on another engine that won't give information culled by higher order search methods. It's just stupid and probably dangerous if someone is dumbly relying on the verity of the information. Knowing this I won't touch Bing
What dumbasses, don't they realize the second question is the answer to the first question? OMG self-referential searching!