Slashdot Mirror
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."
Been using Wolfram-enhanced search already - and without the b*** crap.
What else ya got...
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.
What I'm trying to say here is simply what you all are already thinking
Next time, could you put that at the top of your post so I can skip it without having to first read a bad analogy?
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.
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.
1. Netscape wasn't a public company as well run as Google is today.
2. Underhanded moves can be pulled by anyone, and Google is as smart as if not smarter than MSFT, which still has a lot of old blood from the 80s running the show.
3. Microsoft could also end up trying all the time to play catch up to Google, just like how Linux Desktop is touted as always(not my opinion) playing catch up to Windows or how Windows plays catch up to OSX and still ends up shabby or how Mono plays catch up to Microsoft C#.
The whole bing(TM) backronym of Bing Is Not Google, can also mean that it can never be as good as Google.
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
I wanna know what sound that answer makes.
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
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.
temperature in melbourne works just fine. I guess I just never phrase search queries as complete sentences. You'd think Google would be smart enough to try the query without the "what is" though.
erm, the term is "even a broken clock is right twice a day
But "stopped" makes more sense, at least for an analog clock.
"Broken" could simply means that it loses a minute per day, in which case it's going to be right much less often.