Microsoft has finalized a pact with Wolfram Alpha that will allow their Bing search engine to display some of the specialized scientific search results returned by the Wolfram engine.

Search engines Wolfram Alpha and Bing, owned by Stephen Wolfram and Microsoft respectively, have reached a search-return licensing deal that allows Bing to display some of the scientific and computational return content that Wolfram Alpha generates, according to a source familiar with the deal. The pact was first announced by TechCrunch, according to a CNET story. Neither Microsoft nor Wolfram have as yet said anything about the deal.

The Wolfram search engine is still very much a work in progress after a disastrous launch earlier this year. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might. Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram Alpha then computes and infers answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.

Microsoft, since the launch of their latest search incarnation, known by the unlikely sobriquet “Bing” (perhaps it’s just too reminiscent of “Bob”),  has pretty much purchased the Yahoo search engine wholesale and is now showing a willingness to go further afield in search of supremacy (pun intended). Perhaps due to a massive advertising push, Bing has been slightly more successful than earlier iterations of Microsoft search, although it has not yet done nearly enough to make Google look over its collective shoulder.

Once Microsoft took over Yahoo search, there was very little left in the way of search competition for Google. Google is still far and away the leader in both search and search advertising, with the former being the traffic driver and the latter being the all-important revenue producer. It remains to be seen if the Microsoft Bing engine can make any significant headway in the company’s long-running bid to replace Google as the search engine of choice.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 4:09 pm under Advertising, Google, Yahoo!.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
Stumble It!