

Wolfram Alpha added to Bing - martincmartin
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/bing-now-with-more-wolfram/

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elblanco
Alpha is really struggling to find a successful use-case for its technology.
It has a ridiculously powerful math engine behind a semi-working ontology (not
saying that theirs is bad, just that all general ontologies are "semi-
working") that's driving a rather poor natural language parser (again, pretty
much all NLP's are "poor"). In effect they are trying to use the ontology as a
poor AI to "understand" the NL.

People who want to use Alpha have to deal with it through the NLP window. And
since it pretty much spends most of its time screwing up their input upon
interpretation and not giving them what they want for even fairly simple
cases, it tends not to get used except for very few areas of trivial
encyclopedic fact comparison (population of Borneo and the population of
Hawaii). In effect turning Alpha into a "comparison engine" not a "computation
engine" using facts and data anybody could find just as quickly using Google.

For people that have the knowledge to query non-NLP systems, the power of
Alpha is locked away behind the sucky NLP interface with no recourse. In
effect, it's like putting a Ferrari engine in a combine harvester with a
broken steering wheel.

So now, the idea is to stick Bing's query engine on top of Alpha's NLP engine,
which is on top of their ontology?

That's like taking our franken harvester and putting a good car audio system
in it as well.

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theli0nheart
I wonder who's profiting more from this deal, Wolfram Alpha or Bing?

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noodle
it seems like a good idea for both of them. but in absolute terms, bing
probably has more to gain.

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dandelany
Wolfram Alpha has a lot more to lose... Microsoft is a gigantic company. This
has gotta be Wolfram's #1 revenue source now, and they needed it badly.

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pchristensen
I assume you mean it's Wolfram _Alpha's_ #1 revenue stream, not Wolfram as a
whole.

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dandelany
I do.

