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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?
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.
An opportunity to flood tech sites with more Bingspam, what else do you want?
Microsoft is so desperate for page hits on Bo^Hing, I'm surprised they're not bribing schoolkids with boiled sweets already.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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
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.