Microsoft recently decided to enhance its internal answering engine, which among other things provides meteorological and flight information, with the results of Wolfram|Alpha, offering users an enhanced user experience with “zero-click” answers to many questions posed by users in natural language.
Over half a year has passed since Steven Wolfram, creator of the popular Mathematica software for symbol manipulation, gave life to Wolfram|Alpha, an answer engine that aims to collect and categorize the world’s information enabling users to formulate factual questions in natural language and get an informative answer (including graphs, diagrams, etc.) in return.
Announced just a couple months earlier, the search engine had made news around the world, bringing some to speculate that it could even end up rivaling with Google on a portion of its queries — particularly the knowledge-oriented ones, as opposed to those aimed at searching for products or opinions.
To this date, Alpha maintains a good quota of user that regularly turn to the site to answer factual questions of all kind, and the system, while in no position to compete with Google by itself — approximate statistics from Alexa.com rank it around position 5,000 — does seem to be gradually getting better and better at what it’s doing.
It’s probably for this reason that Microsoft has decided to simply partner with Wolfram|Alpha rather than trying to imitate its features and answers, which are the result of an outstanding number of manually curated pieces of information that would, in all likelihood, take several months to replicate to create an analogous database, even with Microsoft’s resources.
As of now, Alpha’s integration within Bing is limited to nutrition, health and advanced mathematics information. For instance, searching for a food will return a very detailed nutrition tab. Body Mass Index (BMI) tools and an elegant graphic calculator capable of computing integrals and other problems (including in closed-form) are also part of the package.
But this is not all: a number other updates, even though somewhat minor, has also been rolled out to Bing along with the Wolfram|Alpha integration. Bing Videos, for example, was redesigned from the ground up and now allows users to directly access over 900 TV shows and videos from a number of different sources including Hulu, MSN, ABC, and even Google’s YouTube with less clutter and fewer clicks. Microsoft’s algorithms attempts in fact to automatically identify the type content of the video and categorize them for easier access.
Another interesting update were the enhanced results for Bing Travel, which now includes information on local attractions, points of interest and even high-resolution slide shows for a very large number of destinations across the globe.
Other updates include better result for health conditions, medications, and hospitals, with each giving users more information and a more organized set of results. Finally, Bing has improved Bing Maps with features like draggable routes, a zoom bar, command parsing to find driving directions, and the ability to embed a map on a third-party website.
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com.You can visit his personal Web site here.
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