Bing To Use Wolfram Alpha Results 179
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."
wolfram alpha and hubristic user interfaces (Score:5, Informative)
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 [blogspot.com]. 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.
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good move, but... (Score:1, Informative)
What? How do you get Spotlight to act as a calculator? You're not typing "calculator" into it, are you?
It's a feature in 10.5 and up... very slick and even faster than reaching for a slide rule if one uses the Apple-Spacebar shortcut to move focus into Spotlight.
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:5, Informative)
For kicks i checked out bing. It looks nearly identical to google : / The news page does, for sure. I don't have JS enabled for either site, so that might be why. The top nav bars are identical too. The shopping pages look different! Ok, searched for "arduino" on both. Google wins that one. Bing only showed one arduino item (a book, not even the device) and google had all correct results minus one. Ohh, bing images looks good.. correctly showing all arduino pictures too. Ah, but i can't click on anything.. must need javascript enabled. Google is showing similar pictures.. and works without javascript.
I'm still sold on google. Bing looks much cleaner than google though. Google still looks geeky with it's "I did your search in (0.04 seconds)" thing.. can't see that as being very useful. Bing looks more polished but Google is more functional.
Lots of people using Alpha... (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:brb (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, if you ask it to divide a number by 0, it gives you the symbol for (and description of) complex infinity.
(And yes, it does give you a recent temperature for Beijing if you ask it as well).
Re:Hellllooo (Score:1, Informative)
They beat you to it:
Bing goes the internet [youtube.com]
Watching this video is like having your intestinal tract ripped out.
Re:Bleh (Score:3, Informative)
What you were talking about before (U.S. Crude Price converted to another currency) is not what you are talking about now (European Union Crude Price in Euros) What you were talking about before is nearly useless data. Do you not agree?
First: You were not quoting me, but SleepingWaterBear.
Second: Nobody mentioned "U.S Crude Price" before you in the thread. The OP was talking about the "price of oil in non-US dollars"; I didn't mention oil at all.
Third: Crude oil is a pretty uniform commodity trading on a global market, and has a global price. Different flavors or delivery destinations (e.g. West Texas Intermediate or North Sea Brent) have minimal price differences of at most 5%; thus the concept of "THE price of oil" is not nearly useless, but a very useful and commonly used simplification. However, a wrong currency conversion of either of these price series from USD to other currencies like the EUR will distort historical prices by as much as 50% percent or more, rendering the tool useless. QED.
Fourth: Even if you would be right and oil prices in the US were meaningfully different from oil prices in Europe, displaying the US oil price in EUR is not "nearly useless data". Any company which trades in the US oil market and keeps its books in EUR will need that data. (Ever heard of Shell Oil, or Arco/BP, or Total?)
Fifth: "irregardless" is not a word. You are looking for "irrespective" or "regardless".
Wolfram Alpha Google (Score:2, Informative)