14 DAY TRIAL // The recent days have seen a great increase in rumors of a Bing and Wolfram Alpha collaboration. TechCrunch, ZDNet, Cnet and Search Engine Land have reported that a possible licensing deal has been reached between the two search engines.
Nobody wants to see a monopoly in any kind of activity domain, and for sure users don't want just an option when it comes to Internet. The underdog story has always been our favorite: a small guy rises to fight against a giant and wins against all odds. Like David did against Goliath, Bing is now taking on the mammoth Google.
After launching on the scene this spring, Bing has rampaged the search engine market, acquiring the Yahoo Search engine and continuously rising through the traffic and search engine ranks. Recently, more and more people are foreseeing a Bing and Wolfram Alpha collaboration.
Reports are circulating about a licensing deal being struck between Microsoft and Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Wolfram Alpha. According to TechCrunch, Bing will use (when possible) Wolfram Alpha computational search results to display supplemental information to website visitors.
Sources close to Wolfram Alpha have been pointing to a possible financial implication from Microsoft, and a watermark on the form of a “results by Wolfram Alpha” on any generated results displayed through Bing from Wolfram Alpha.
Recently, Wolfram Alpha has updated its computational and Mathematica algorithms to fix some of the bugs reported after the launch in April this year, but still remains on the bottom half of the list when it comes to search engine usage and website visitors. Until now, Wolfram Alpha has managed to wow the experts, but still hasn't succeeded in finding an adequate usage for its results when it comes to regular users.
No details or comments have been made by Wolfram Alpha or Microsoft regarding this topic, and if anybody has been following the way these big companies strike deals, this will be the strongest and biggest clue that something is going on behind our backs. Or let's say behind Google's back, to be more accurate.