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."
brb (Score:5, Funny)
Re:brb (Score:4, Insightful)
I wanna know what sound that answer makes.
Re:brb (Score:5, Funny)
Well, out of interest I went out and tried it. While remembering Bing is located at www.bing.com, I google'd it because thats faster. Now I'm at the Bing homepage, taking a sip of my morning coffee. I write the query to the search box and
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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:brb (Score:4, Funny)
brb, dividing by zero on bing
Found 1 result:
LHC_Homepage ... LHC Safety. LHC Cooldown Status. LHC@ interactions.org ... Revised: 2009-09-30 LHC Webmaster.
LHC - THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER
LHC NEWS - Cooldown_status - CERN Document Server
www.cern.ch/lhc
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That's great and all, but I was very disappointed with the result I got:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+bing+worth+using%3F [wolframalpha.com]
That's a question I really want an answer for.
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No reason to be. It just means that WA is truly intelligent, for it has learned the fine art of not technically lying while not giving an answer contrary to its business interests either. Truly a great leap in AI.
Hellllooo (Score:4, Insightful)
What else ya got...
Re:Hellllooo (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Microsoft is so desperate for page hits on Bo^Hing, I'm surprised they're not bribing schoolkids with boiled sweets already.
I dunno the computer labs at my sisters school switched to Bing homepages and gave out candy on the same day. Coincidence? Maybe, but I wouldn't put it past them.
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Been using Wolfram-enhanced search already - and without the b*** crap.
Dude, you can say 'bull', we won't be offended. Honest! :-D
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'm trying to say here is simply what you all are already thinking
Next time, could you put that at the top of your post so I can skip it without having to first read a bad analogy?
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, I don't understand. Why would you come to /. if you don't want to read a bad analogy?
Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:5, Funny)
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You beat me to it. Just like when I tried to nab the last space in the car park, but someone else took it first.
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Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:4, Funny)
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I think there's some variation; I've always preferred "stopped watch" myself.
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erm, the term is "even a broken clock is right twice a day
But "stopped" makes more sense, at least for an analog clock.
"Broken" could simply means that it loses a minute per day, in which case it's going to be right much less often.
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Re:Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (Score:5, Funny)
Digital clocks don't have hands
Obviously. They have fingers.
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sudo mod me up
I would, if I had some. ROTFL!
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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: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.
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I want to know which search engine is the least threat to my privacy. I'll use that one, thanks.
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Wow! I'd never heard of Cuil [cuil.com] (linked for the lazy) and it's actually quite nice. I like the summary accompanying each result and the option to search by category. I'll put that into my browser for a few days and see how it goes. Cheers!
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Has anyone actually tried out Bing to get Wolfram Alpha results? They don't work for me. Is this only for within the US?
http://www.bing.com/search?q=plot%20x^2&form=QBLH [bing.com]
http://www.bing.com/search?q=BMI+Calculator&FORM=R5FD [bing.com]
These just show the web results for me, no WA. I even enabled JS and there is nothing in the preferences. :-/
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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.
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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:5, Insightful)
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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.
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You want a laugh? Ask for the IBM share price in zimbabwean dollars -- apparently the low price was -Z$47.51, about four months ago.
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Bing is clearly trying to be the search engine for the masses, a one stop shop for anything. In this it is being successful, and may be the future. I don't currently see the value in a one stop shop as I know where to go if I want a different information. For weather, I go to the NOAA or the weather channel. For math inform I go to mathworl
What if humans are the stopped clock? (Score:3, Insightful)
In that the current google search is so good for the majority of users, that they are trying to grab at a few disatisfied straws. I can't really think of a way google search fails me, but perhaps if the results were presented a different way, I could see the clear-cut differences and improvements.
I think text search is pretty much there. The one thing I would appreciate is a better image search, and not relying on text of the image name, but being able to describe it, or sketch a rough outline, and for a
Re:What if humans are the stopped clock? (Score:4, Funny)
Most common search term: (oYo).
Actually I'm kinda surprised this doesn't work already. Maybe there IS room for Bang to innovate in the text search field.
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Actually, the Alpha's concept is good. It just needs more data and computing capacity.
I'm surprised Google didn't find it before M$.
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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.
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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 ).
Bleh (Score:4, Insightful)
So far I haven't been terribly impressed with Wolfram Alpha.
For example, searching for the price of oil in non-US dollars results in a US dollar timeline multiplied by the CURRENT exchange rate of that foreign currency, not in the historical timeline. It's like Alpha is having a stab at an answer, but isn't smart enough to know when it's answering the question wrong.
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Neither was I.
I asked the thing a simple question, pertinent to the minds of many: "How to get rich quick?" and it went on about some nonsense about surnames of "Quick" and "Rich" and how many of these there are in the US...
I mean, yes it was a joke but seriously, this "semantic" search engine is incapable of doing even most basic natural language parsing, something that AI research projects were capable of back in the 1960s, instead assuming th
New site name (Score:3, Funny)
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Presumably data exist about historical exchange rates, so it ought to be able to correlate that data to produce a correct result. At the least, it shouldn't pretend to have an accurate answer when it's just fudging matters. In this case, Alpha has produced a result that's worse than useless for any serious purpose since it is apparently reasonable, yet completely wrong.
In any case, this is *exactly* the sort of basic processing Alpha needs to be able to do right to be useful. If Alpha can't do this sort
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Why do you want to know the historic "value" of oil in non-fixed units, and how often is that more desirable than the historic value of oil in fixed (typically todays) units?
The historic value of oil in Euro is relevant for somebody who -- let's go out on a limb here -- lives in Europe, for instance. To clarify: every other currency is just as much of a "fixed unit" as the USD, it's just that the relationship between those currencies and the USD is not constant. A financial or economic tool that can only display values of GDP, stock prices, etc in USD is useless for 95% of the world.
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The historic value of oil in Euro is relevant for somebody who -- let's go out on a limb here -- lives in Europe, for instance.
This is not the same thing as was implied.
The implied behavior (quoting you: Presumably data exist about historical exchange rates) was to graph the converted U.S. market price for crude while converting from USD to another currency.
You do realize that different markets have different prices, irregardless of exchange rates... right? right?
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
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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 usele
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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 sou
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In Australia we buy oil from the Singapore exchange, which STILL isn't in Australian dollars.
So even using that market, the need for translation is still useful.
Or what about the gold price, or Chicago exchange coffee prices...
The problem here is not the question, it's that the answer is illogical
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.
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It must actually read the user's mind. God can do this
Google is God?
Of course!... the motto finally makes sense!
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It could do things the average person might want (such as generating customized nutrition labels) as well as [...].
Generating customized nutrition labels! The average person! I just laughed so hard, I needed a complete change of clothing.
That guy has never seen a women on a diet. And I think you missed a level of <quote>-tags
Good move, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
While this is interesting and possibly useful, it seems to me there's nothing stopping Google from turning around and doing the exact same thing. Wolfram is unaffiliated with either party as far as I know and certainly wouldn't mind getting exposure on the bigger of the two search engines as well.
And hey, I already do multiplication and find constants in my Google search box, it might be nice to do integrals and whatnot as well! In the meantime, if I have a specific enough question I'll just go directly to Wolfram's site to ask.
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But I don't think it will be better to the average person (or to me). Unless Wolfram Alpha starts making massive improvements, it will remain a toy.
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If I have a specific enough question, I ask google :)
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there's nothing stopping Google from turning around and doing the exact same thing.
But really, why would they? Google's results often contain links to exactly the same places. And arguably more useful places, too.
Google Dodecahedron [google.ca] and you get #1 wikipedia.com - #2 wolfram.com
I tried using Wolfram Alpha, but every time I do it tells me "Wolfram Alpha wasn't sure what to do with your input."
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It starts at a minimum commitment of $2,000/mo at $0.10 per query. At the high end it's $220,000/mo at $0.023 per query. I wonder how much google makes off each search? Can't be much more than that.
Next up... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
Surely that's precisely the point of including Alpha's results in Bing (a plain old search engine). If users don't think Alpha will support a query, they'll usually just search the web hoping someone has answered a similar question before on a forum somewhere. Net result, not many people use Alpha because they don't know what it supports so they usually go straight to the plain old search engine instead. But if a plain old search engine can push suitable queries to Alpha, then you've actually got somethi
It answers the most important questions though. (Score:5, Funny)
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)" [wolframalpha.com]
Query: What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
Answer: 42 [wolframalpha.com]
Query: Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
Answer: Not sure, but wherever she is, it isn't here. [wolframalpha.com]
Query: When is judgement day?
Answer: "2:14 am EDT | Friday, August 29, 1997" [wolframalpha.com]
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." [wolframalpha.com]
Query: Can entropy be reversed?
Answer: "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER." [wolframalpha.com]
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." [wolframalpha.com]
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Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
That's a lie. In fact, I can prove that your last post was full of proven facts!
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It still doesn't know what the question to life, the universe and everything is.
Sounds great but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Best of breed hype engine (Score:2)
LOL. I'll bet a dollar that this is more or less how the two go about creating a new standard in hype engines.
Xix.
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What's more likely is that Wolfram will barely survive the knife MS is sure to stick in their back. I predict within 3 years, MS will announce its own version. Wolfram, acting like a blushing bride running back to Mommy crying, will file a lawsuit which will be mired in legal limbo until a settlement is reached.
I just asked bing: (Score:4, Funny)
How can the suckiness of Microsoft be reversed? It said:
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER
This wolfram thing might be working out after all.
Other Microsoft News Has Me Wondering (Score:2)
How long will it take Microsoft to try to patent complex computational searches?
Interesting (Score:2)
Bing may incorporate some Wolfram Alpha functionality - but if you "search the web" from Wolfram Alpha's website, it sends you to Google.
Well, it got this one right (Score:2)
Yeah right... (Score:2)
As if Bing users had the brains to even spell "math" correctly. Because if they had the brains, they wouldn't use Bing in the first place. ^^
Wolfram Alpha Google (Score:2, Informative)
Re:is google the next netscape? (Score:4, Insightful)
i think it's a valid question. netscape went from total market domination to nothing in a few years. granted MS pulled from under handed moves to make it happen that would be a LOT harder to do this time around, the scene is set the same. google innovates and takes market by storm, MS puts out a few non starters, eventually refines it's product to take the lead.
1. Netscape wasn't a public company as well run as Google is today.
2. Underhanded moves can be pulled by anyone, and Google is as smart as if not smarter than MSFT, which still has a lot of old blood from the 80s running the show.
3. Microsoft could also end up trying all the time to play catch up to Google, just like how Linux Desktop is touted as always(not my opinion) playing catch up to Windows or how Windows plays catch up to OSX and still ends up shabby or how Mono plays catch up to Microsoft C#.
The whole bing(TM) backronym of Bing Is Not Google, can also mean that it can never be as good as Google.
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this could be deliberate, but it's hard to see how a publicly traded company wouldn't pursue other forms of revenue if they could.
the major thing google has in their favour, is that MS has no legal way to blo
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So what? Google only makes money from advertising, MS only makes money from softwarel licensing. I see no reason to think eaither revenue stream is going to disappear in a hurry.
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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
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.
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MS puts out a few non starters, eventually refines it's product to take the lead.
Not if it keeps up its current marketing incompetence. I've been amazed at how stupid their approach has been with their obnoxious pop-up search windows.
They've turned a whole bunch of 3rd-party websites into minefields, where you don't dare move your mouse cursor. If you're unlucky enough to hover over one of their stupid "links" that's put on every 10th common English word, then they evade popup blockers and slap in a huge irrelevant window topped with bing that covers up exactly what you're trying to rea
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netscape went from total market domination to nothing in a few years. granted MS pulled from under handed moves to make it happen
I remember buying Microsoft's Internet Starter Kit in 1996.
It came with a handsome paperback book and a useful bundle of software, and sold directly for about $10-20.
Bundling IE with AOL was another smart move. Integrating a look-alike - work-alike - e-mail client and a browser into the Windows consumer product was a logical progression that made perfect sense to the user.
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They add parenthesis in opposite fashion, so they are both right. I don't know which one I would consider more intuitive.
bing: 2^2 = 4 ^ 2 = 16 ^ 2= 256 ^ 2 = 65536
google: 2^2 = 4. 2 ^ (2 ^ 2) = 2 ^ 4 = 16. 2 ^ (2 ^ ( 2 ^ 2)) = 2 ^ (16) = 65536
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: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 ;-)
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It seems that Bing is copying BASIC behavior (which has always been left-to-right for all operators of the same precedence, including ^).
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Some guy wanted to mod you interesting but he accidentally scrolled down by a few before clicking (something I've done multiple times when modding - yes, the interface sucks)
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The number of Texas Hold'em starting hands is 52 choose 2 [google.com]
When I hold one of those, the number of possible 3 card flops is 50 choose 3 [google.com]
The percent chance of being dealt pocket aces is 100 * (4 choose 2) / (52 choose 2) [google.com]
Jenny's phone number in binary is 8675309 [google.com]