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Bing strikes licensing deal with Wolfram Alpha

Microsoft's Bing search engine is getting a little help from a very smart friend.

Wolfram Alpha and Bing have reached a licensing deal that allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates, according to a source familiar with the deal. The deal was reported earlier by TechCrunch.

Representatives from Microsoft and Wolfram Research declined to comment on the deal.

Wolfram Alpha's unique blend of computational input and curated output hasn't taken the world by storm, but it is considered an interesting enough take on the business of Internet search … Read more

Wolfram Alpha's baseball info just a bit outside

It's been two months since Wolfram Alpha launched, and in some ways, the "computation knowledge engine" is still fouling off pitches.

Wolfram used the occasion of Major League Baseball's 2009 All-Star Game--otherwise known as the three most boring days of the baseball season--to highlight the ability of Wolfram Alpha to process baseball-related queries. "...what we at Wolfram Alpha love about baseball are all of the fast statistics that can be quickly computed and returned as easy-to-read graphs," the company said in a blog post.

A few examples were provided, such as the ability … Read more

The many ways to access Wolfram Alpha

Say what you will about Wolfram Alpha, the creators are hard at work trying to drum up interest in the site.

On Tuesday, the WA crew launched a number of updates to its service, some of which I tested. Now the team's Thursday blog points you to the many "cool tools" you can use to access the site--buttons, widgets, gadgets, and more. You can grab them from the Wolfram Alpha download page, where you'll find the tools organized by operating system and browser. I took them all for a spin to see how they fared.

Toolbars … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 993: Viagra sponsors orbit mission

We are almost done talking about the Pre and iPhone, but not quite. We do talk about the Nokia N91 and Qik streaming on all Nokia phones. Twitter may be dead or at least hibernating. Wolfram Alpha gets a little smarter, the iPhone knows if you're going to get sick, plus some E3 roundup news. Also, a new inflatable tube could send you to space and the Pleo is not extinct after all.

Listen now: Download today's podcast Subscribe now: iTunes (audio) | iTunes (video) | RSS (audio) | RSS (video) EPISODE 993

Nokia N97 out for $700 http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/09/the-nokia-n97-hits-nokia-stores-for-700-today/… Read more

Wolfram Alpha rolls out core updates

Though only three weeks old, Wolfram Alpha is already showing growing spurts.

On Monday, the project unleashed a variety of updates to its computational search engine, according to the latest blog from the Wolfram Alpha team. The updates include 1,850 changes to its code base and 1.1 million updates to its data.

In one sense, Wolfram Alpha is in constant update mode, since new data is flowing into the system all the time. But this is the company's first major release of so many core updates in one shot.

The blog post lists about 20 of the … Read more

Wolfram Alpha holding live Q&A Thursday

Wolfram Research is looking for feedback on its new Wolfram Alpha service.

The company plans to hold a Webcast Thursday at 2 p.m. PDT on Justin.tv to discuss Wolfram Alpha, now entering its third week of existence. "We thought you'd enjoy hearing Stephen Wolfram respond to some of this feedback directly," Wolfram said in a blog post Monday afternoon.

CNET readers had plenty of feedback for Wolfram Alpha following its initial debut, marred by technical glitches and an incomplete understanding of how the service was meant to be used. Anyone who didn't get a … Read more

CNET News Daily Podcast: What Wolfram Alpha is really all about

We asked CNET readers who tried out Wolfram Alpha, which has been live for a week now, to tell us about their experiences with the new "computational engine." Reporter Tom Krazit sifted through the nearly 1,600 responses we got and writes that, by and large, people weren't terribly impressed with what they saw. But he notes that their frustrations might really come down to confusion about what the tool is really designed for. He talks on today's podcast about what Wolfram Alpha does well, what it does poorly, and explains how different it is from … Read more

Wolfram Alpha searching for its niche

One week after a shaky debut, Wolfram Alpha is a lot more stable but is still having trouble defining exactly why information seekers should give it a try.

Any new search service that attempts to launch in the Age of Google is in for inevitable comparisons to the search giant. (And any search hopeful should also strive to learn from the unhappy launch of Google challenger Cuil last summer.)

But Wolfram Alpha says it represents something very different, and that people should not treat its "computational engine" the same way they do Google's search box. CNET readers … Read more