Bing’s announcement today explains that the collaboration will cover two specific areas: nutritional information and mathematics.

Nutritional Data

With help from Wolfram Alpha, Bing says it can now help users make smarter diet choices. When searching for specific food items, searchers will see a new Nutrition tab that offers more information. And at the bottom of the search results page, Bing will show the nutrition facts labels — the kind you see on product packaging.

Bing is also pulling in a Body Mass Index calculator from Wolfram Alpha that lets user learn about BMI within Bing’s search results.

Mathematics Data

This is where we all expected any Bing-Wolfram Alpha partnership to be revealed: using Bing’s search box to get the kind of computational results and data that Wolfram Alpha is perhaps best known for.

These new Wolfram-powered features will roll out in the U.S. “over the next several days.” Bing has also posted three short video interview clips with Wolfram Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram talking about their partnership.

State of the search engine

In a separate blog post, Bing has shared what amounts to a “state of the search engine” report. In it, Bing recaps and reveals some of the new features and tools that have been added since its May/June launch and talks about what Bing has learned from usage patterns and focus group testing.

The new features include

• quicker access to Bing’s popular travel search features from the Bing.com home page
• faster access to flight search and listings data
• new “city results pages” with important information about popular attractions, city photos, local neighborhoods and more
• new “page preview” features, including pulling contact information from a web page and showing it in Bing’s search results previews
• new “event search” functionality with categorized events for “major cities”
• a “search sharing” tool for product results that lets users send a result to friends via email or on Facebook/Twitter
• new search results for some health-related queries, with more information and newly organized sets of results

As with the Wolfram Alpha integration, Bing says these new features will start to show up in search results over the next “several days.”

Wired implies that Kayak is concerned about the similarities causing brand confusion with its users, and even noted an “uncomfortable” comparison in their own review of Bing, and points out that others have noticed as well. You can see further evidence of others comparing Bing vs Kayak from a variety of sources, including TechCrunch’s early review, where commenters pointed out that Bing Travel gave lower airfares than Kayak, though they use the same airline data sources.

Microsoft spokesperson Whitney Burk denied the accusations , telling Wired:

“We are discussing the matter with Kayak,” Burk said in emailed statement. “Bing Travel is based on independent development by Microsoft and Farecast.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2008. Any contrary allegations are without merit.”

However, the Farecast technology which Microsoft acquired is not the issue here, since Kayak does not run a similar fare prediction service, they are not claiming an infringement on technology, but just the user interface, namely Bing’s use of “sliders”.

Sliders have become a popular tool on many “Web 2.0″ based sites, and Farecast did initially use them in design.  Last year, another start-up in airfare comparison, InsideTrip.com, debuted (May 2008) using sliders much like Kayak or Bing does. In Greg Sterling’s write-up, you can see the similarity:

Note that InsideTrip was also founded by Dave Pelter, who held two year executive position at Farecast.com. Is it the fact that InsideTrip.com has not gained (or rather, sustained) enough traction for Kayak users to be as affected by the similar slider options?

Hakia holds similar views

Kayak isn’t the only one crying foul, as hakia also blogged when Bing launched, hakia claimed that Bing’s categorized search is a similar version to its own hakia Galleries, using the example of a search for “Obama”:

“hakia Galleries prove 17 aspects of this query. We save the user time by answering 17 Obama related questions in one search. Compare the hakia Obama gallery with the same search at Bing.com (Bing provides only 7 aspects of this search query).”

Hakia’s COO, Melek Pulatkonak also recently told Investor’s Business Daily that they’d been in early partnership talks with Microsoft in July, and stated:

“We were approached by Microsoft to show them how the hakia galleries worked, and we did, and now they have a similar feature — we showed them how to do it,” she said. “We were surprised that it is a featured part of and the most differentiated part of Bing.”

Microsoft also denies that hakia had any part in the development of Bing’s categorized search, which Microsoft refers to as “faceted search”.