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."

Comments

what about how Wulfram Alpha is not useful?

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:so much worse than one power more than Google

[erayd]

Google is correct, because it actually evaluates the expression properly. Bing just parses it left to right.

Google: 2^2^2^2 = 2^(2^(2^2)) = 65,536
Bing: 2^2^2^2 = ((2^2)^2)^2 = 256

Clearly, bing doesn't understand basic math.

Re:so much worse than one power more than Google

[FrostedWheat]

I would have thought that the Bing result was right, since expressions of the same level are normally done from left to right. But I did a little reading and your right!

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations

... when two operators have the same precedence, they are normally applied from left to right. The exception is exponentiation: if it is indicated by symbols places at different heights in a display, stacked exponents are evaluated from the top down, and if indicated by a caret, the operators are evaluated from right to left. Thus a typewritten string "4^3^2" and a display 432 are evaluated as equal to 4^(3^2), i.e. 4^9 or 262144.)

I can do maths, Me ;-)