wolfram

Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine launches Wed 3 Jun 2009

Networking & Internet / By Khalid Hosein / June 1, 2009

Microsoft is set to fully launch Bing, their brand new search engine on Wednesday 3 June [Update: MS says launch date is now today!]. But don’t call it a ‘search engine’; call it a ‘decision engine’ says Microsoft. Bing’s results page look remarkably like Google’s or Yahoo’s, but it will also include a set of ‘related results’ down the left side of the page.

These related results will be generated by technology created by Powerset, a company that Microsoft acquired last year. Powerset represents information in triples much like competitor Wolfram Alpha, as well as ‘answering’ questions directly.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft can pull away traffic from Google in the search engine wars. It’s really going to depend on whether Bing can provide a better search experience getting people quicker to what they’re really looking for. And that’s going to be a matter of perspective on the part of users, and not wrapped in the statistics of which engine is ‘better’.

Wolfram Alpha promises computing that answers questions

Networking & Internet / By Khalid Hosein / March 8, 2009

Computer scientist, Stephen Wolfram, feels that he has put together at least the initial version of a computer that actually answers factual questions, a la Star Trek’s ship computers. His version will be found on their Web-based application, Wolfram Alpha.

What does this mean? Well instead of returning links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer to your questions, Wolfram will respond with the actual answer. Now the caveat ‘factual’ is important. You can ask it questions like ‘why is the sky blue?’ or ‘how many bones are in the human body?’, but probably not ‘do you think abortion is wrong?’. This computational knowledge engine uses natural language to parse the questions and can also accept coded queries.

For the subject areas that Wolfram covers, they not only had to either enter or import data on those subjects, but had to build models or create algorithms for breaking down and describing that data in simpler building blocks. Long story short, my question is how easy is it going to be expand into additional subject areas?

Don’t bother trying to visit the site just yet – it’s not launching until May 2009. If this works well, this is going to revolutionize computing and in particular, the search engine market. Google of course comes to mind. Would they see this as a threat? I imagine they should. so I think what will be important here is how quickly Wolfram can expand into additional subject areas. If they give Google enough time to get into this market, then they could be sunk.

via Techcrunch