Bing's instant answers—in which the search engine tries to answer your question right on the search results page—include basic calculations, flight information, local weather, sports scores, ski conditions, translations, and so on. Now the search engine is adding results that come from Wolfram|Alpha, a service started in May 2009 by noted scientist Stephen Wolfram, that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data. Not everyone will see the changes just yet.
Instead of trying to mimic what Wolfram|Alpha can do, Microsoft has simply partnered with the website to use tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of "expertly curated" data from Wolfram|Alpha within Bing. Specifically, Bing will show nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics information from Wolfram|Alpha. When you search for a specific food item on Bing, you'll get a nutrition quick tab that allows you to learn more about it, plus a nutrition facts label at the bottom of the results page that summarizes all information on that food item. There's also a Body Mass Index (BMI) tool: enter your height and weight, click Calculate and you'll get Wolfram|Alpha's detailed BMI analysis right on Bing's results page.
In May 2009, we did a hands-on with Wolfram|Alpha, and we called it a small step from being a glorified graphing calculator. It might have more use for those who are already using Bing as their default search engine though, as they won't have to navigate to a separate website; we'll probably use it sporadically. This isn't a revolutionary addition, but it's still a welcome evolutionary one and shows how much Microsoft is making an effort to differentiate Bing from Google.
More updates to Bing
Last night, Microsoft updated Bing Videos and folded MSN Videos into the new webpage, where users can find TV shows (over 900, Microsoft says), videos, and content from top sites such as Hulu, MSN, ABC, and YouTube. The experience is supposed to be faster than the previous ones, reorganizes the content so that you can browse for the videos you want to see with less clicks, makes sharing easier, and now includes a "dim the lights" optional feature that emphasizes the current video by dimming everything else.
There's more coming though. In addition to Bing Travel, which lets you plan and book trips, hundreds of cities will now include enhanced results that include information on local attractions, points of interest, neighborhoods, high-resolution slide shows, and other local data sources like newspaper websites. The preview feature, which appears if you mouseover your cursor to the right side of search results, will start to include more images and will change from an orange dot to a blue plus sign. Microsoft also says it will do a better job mining data like contact phone numbers and e-mail addresses from webpages and displaying them clearly under a Contact banner.
There's also a new event search feature on the way, which provides a quick summary of events for major cities, and can be filtered by categories like performances, civic activities, music, and so on. To add to that, Bing will also make it easy to see prices from popular ticket vendors across the Web for some of these events and even give you related venue information right in the search results page.
Remember all the hubbub over Bing & Ping? The search sharing feature, which lets you share your search results over Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail in two clicks, will be integrated over the coming days as well.
Microsoft says it has also introduced better results for health conditions, medications, and hospitals: each gives you more information and a more organized set of results to make it easy to get your health-related questions answered. Finally, Bing will also give more detailed information on the weather and has improved Bing Maps. New features include draggable routes, a zoom bar, command parsing (to find driving directions, traffic info and so on), the ability to embed a map in your site, dynamic compute (Bing Maps now runs in data centers in seven locations around the world and the closest one to you will be chosen), new navigation links (Welcome, Car, Star, Envelop, Printer, and Traffic light), world wrap (Bing Maps will no longer stop at the international date line), and a smaller homepage size (from 678kb to 484kb).
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