The battle to be the king of answers continues, but instead of crowdsourcing those answers from the masses as Facebook and Quora are doing, Bing has taken a different approach, teaming with Wolfram|Alpha to offer more scientific answers to searchers’ questions.
If you’re not familiar with Wolfram|Alpha, it in itself is a kind of search engine, but aimed at the academic and scientific set. Bing seems to be planning on using it as more of a middle-school educational tool, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The new integration will answer questions like “What is the capital of France?” or “What is the boiling point of water?” and can be used to compare geographical data, i.e. comparing the populations of two or more countries.
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Another useful feature that Bing announced is giving a clear answer to dates/holidays. This in itself would be worthy of an announcement – we can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to search through 2-3 links in Google just to find the correct date for Labor Day and other holidays. Very useful feature.
As we said last week when Microsoft announced some other big new features, Bing is certainly on a roll. How are you finding the new features? Is Bing answering your questions correctly? Please let us know in the comments!
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