seoFool.com

By John Elder

Yesterday Bing announced they will begin showing certain computational search results from the Wolfram Alpha search engine.

Wolfram Alpha isn’t a regular search engine in the sense that they don’t return a list of web pages to other sites. Instead, it is a computational knowledge engine, mostly dealing with math and other scientific type things. You ask it a question, it gives you an answer. Like “What’s 2 + 2” it will tell you “4”.

The Bing results will probably be labeled “Wolfram Alpha” in some way to distinguish from regular Bing results, but that’s not confirmed.

The Wolfram Alpha search engine has been out for a while, but hasn’t really caught on in the broader sense. I’ve wondered for some time what they would end up doing with themselves. I thought someone might buy them outright. Someone like Google, perhaps.

I said they haven’t really caught on, but I meant that in a popularity sense. The general public may not know about them, but everyone in the search industry does. Their founder, Stephen Wolfram, is a respected scientist and many people have suggested that Wolfram Alpha could be as important as Google some day.

I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the technology is certainly interesting and makes you think about search engines in a completely different way.

Details of this new Bing/Wolfram deal are a little sketchy, but I gather this isn’t an exclusive deal. Bing just happens to be the largest purchaser of the Wolfram API to date.

What this deal tells me is that Bing is taking itself serious. Last month Bing stole the march on Google by announcing that it will index Twitter feeds and now they’ve seemingly beat Google to Wolfram. This sort of competition can only make search better and I’m happy to finally see signs of life from Microsoft.

Is this new deal going to seriously take a dent out of Google’s search market share? No, not even a little. Is this deal a satisfying step forward for Bing? Absolutely.

What do you think? Will this new partnership help Bing gain market share? Will it make Bing a better search engine? Comment below!

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