Wolfram Alpha, a new enhancement to Bing

GGarza | Nov 12, 2009 | Comments

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Microsoft announced a new enhancement to Bing, the Search Engine that is supposed to compete with Google and Yahoo. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine enhancement that allows querying of complex scientific information.

Link To Wolfram Alpha from Your Site

For example, with Alpha, one can ask to produce a correlation graph of the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Such a query using Yahoo or Google would produce hits, to be sure, but they would be more in the area of links showing documents, pdf’s, or forums, perhaps some images. But Wolfram Alpha uses special algorithms, designed by scientist, Stephen Wolfram, where the special algorithms create “computable knowledge.”

Wolfram Alpha

Here are some examples of what Wolfram Alpha will do. Ask it to provide the day of the week you were born, given your birthdate, and it will provide the answer. Ask it to provide the number of calories in a pizza with pepperoni and cheeze, and it will tell you. Ask it to provide you with the number of years since the release of the movie “Casablanca” and it will tell you.

These examples may be superficially interesting, but ask it to draw a graph from an equation, and when it is produced this is more in line with the “computational knowledge” that would separate it from Google. On a practical side, ask it to compare vitamins from three different fruits and you can do your shopping.

Computational knowledge is a results driven search that produces information in ways that make it easy to work with. Links may be the result of a normal search engine, but computational knowledge produces information that is easy to grasp. Graphs are standard as are summaries.

Microsoft aims to provide users with search results that are more than page links. They want to provide users with knowledge.

Wolfram Alpha is still in the development stage, even though it has been added to Bing. Some results are not very good for example if you ask for information about Blackberry Storm, you can get information about the fruit and meteorology. But it is making inroads into the Google factory, and while that is not bad when you think about it, it means that Microsoft will add another cannon to its arsenal of domination.

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