Microsofts new search engine Bing is now live, two days ahead of schedule, available for anyone to use. The world has already been taking the latest search engine for a test drive to see the successor to Live Search. via Bing Goes Live, Some Bloggers Shocked to Find Porn – PC World.
Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram.
The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine.
The “computational knowledge engine”, as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year.
“Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime,” said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard Universitys Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The tool computes many of the answers “on the fly” by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information.
People can use the system to look up simple facts – such as the height of Mount Everest – or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a countrys GDP.
via BBC NEWS | Technology | Web tool as important as Google.