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."
Are You Delusional Or Just Stupid? (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft's latest rebranding of their failed search engine has lower marketshare now than when it was released.
It has lower marketshare than last year before it was rebranded with the new stupid 'bing' name.
Microsoft is so desperate they are resorting to paying the distant second place search engine Yahoo to use Microsoft's own last place search engine.
"eventually refines it's product to take the lead."
Yeah, that's the story you want to believe. Too bad Reality is fucking it up.
what about how Wulfram Alpha is not useful? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [ijcai-09.org], 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.
so much worse than one power more than Google (Score:0, Interesting)
bing says 2^2^2^2^2 = 65536 [bing.com]
google says 2^2^2^2 = 65535 [google.com]
Which one is right??
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:3, Interesting)
Google (and Bing I think) are displaying quick info on calculations, currency conversations and such too. This is just taking a step further in that, and I gotta admit it's handy. This again actually makes me want to move to Bing again, considering quality of search results are quite equivalent with Google.
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets try what is the temperature in melbourne
Wolfram gives me the best result IMHO, and google the worst. Bing is close to wolfram but using a different source of data. For the average luser out there a nice chart or graphic is better than a link which you have to follow.
Re:so much worse than one power more than Google (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe you should try your search as "Melbourne weather" instead. The results differ.
In addition, I used " weather" on all three, and found that Google displayed a pretty picture, whilst Bing didn't know about it.
Wolfram is of course more useful, with the graphing and whatnot.
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:3, Interesting)
Try a few more searches. WA was the best for "uk time" and Bing the worst. Google UK was the best for "glaxo share price" (and the only one that gave me what I wanted), and again Bing was the worst. Wolfram gave the right answer in the wrong currency (the primary listing in London, so the price should be in GBP pence.
Re:is google the next netscape? (Score:3, Interesting)
I now use Bing for at least 50% of my searches, and more than that if I am looking for images. The potential problem Google has is that is incredibly easy to use another search engine. It's more difficult to switch an OS. I will be the first to admit that Bing is as good as it is, given the previous attempts Microsoft made.
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:3, Interesting)
Who is actually using Bing?
Well unfortunately here in Canada the Multiple Listing Service, which almost all Realtors use to advertise real estate for sale, has switched over to Bing from Google and Google maps. It is a large decrease in usability and functionality. But then MLS seems to feel a need to completely change it's public interface for the worse every year or two - I guess they have to or nobody would bother hiring a Realtor.
Re:so much worse than one power more than Google (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]
I can do maths, Me ;-)
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:2, Interesting)
Who is actually using Bing?
simple, everybody that don't understand the difference between the address edit zone and the search edit zone. The one that don't understand what is internet and using IE and like it! ( because it is an habit and never tried anything else ).
Re:Bleh (Score:3, Interesting)
However, my point still stands, because that person was the person I was responding to originally, who wanted prices from one market to be converted via exchange rate, rather than simply using the prices from another market.
Wolfram seems to only have historic crude prices for a few markets, so I suspect what he was after was a conversion from US market prices to his local currency. As I pointed out.. its not useful information. He should find a source for local crude prices if wolfram doesnt have them. The noise of an exchange rate only defeats his purpose.