Rumor on partnership Bing-Wolfram Alpha
Jinfo Blog

24th August 2009

By Udo Hohlfeld

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Google, Bing and the like are search engines providing the searcher with links to online sources that may contain the information and data to their search question. Wolfram Alpha says from itself to be a "computational knowledge engine" that seeks to provide answers and not just links. For this task it uses structured data to increase the quality of search results. Its interface allows the searcher to fill in search queries in natural language. Wolfram Alpha comes back to you with relevant facts, charts, illustrations and other related data to provide you with what you need to generate the answer you seek. Kind of semantic search already? Maybe the beginnings, but at least this interesting and promising that rumors came up maintaining that Microsoft struck a deal with Wolfram Alpha to license parts of the data base the company uses for their service. The rumor was reported on TechCrunch: http://digbig.com/5bafdk Neither Wolfram Alpha nor Microsoft commented on this. If this rumor turns out to be true, then Microsoft was able to place another pinprick on Google. First the Yahoo deal and the search engine overhaul (Bing) and now - possibly - a new partnership in a promising area of the search engine technology. Microsoft may finally have found the right way to improve its competitiveness against Google. We soon will see ...

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