There’s a lot of news today coming out of Bing headquarters, perhaps most notably that the long-rumored partnership with Wolfram Alpha is finally coming to fruition.

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.”

There’s a way in which the just-released iPhone version of Wolfram Alpha makes more sense than the web version. The web version suggests a Google-like general search engine, which it is not; it’s a “computational” or “fact engine” with a more limited range of use cases. It does what it does well — offer a range of data, calculations and statistics often in a graphical form — but often there are also no results or no directly relevant results for general or conventional search queries.

But holding Wolfram in your hand on the iPhone suggests a “calculator,” which it more closely resembles (especially with the additional keys pictured on the home screen). In addition, there’s a good deal of instruction on how and when to use it, together with example queries and associated results.

I found in testing it over the weekend that I would be much more inclined to use the iPhone version than the online version of the engine. I would even say it was more “fun.” As an added bonus, you can also get access to Google search through the iPhone Wolfram; every result gives users the option to “search the web” (via Google) for any query entered.

But rather than the user experience or capabilities, most people writing about the app today seem to be focused on the app’s price: $49.99. I asked Wolfram’s PR people what the rationale behind the pricing was in an email. Here was what they said:

$49.99 is basically less than 1/2 the price of a graphing calculator with inferior functionality in comparison, which is how the company came to that number. Or, as we’ve been saying, the price of 12 lattes from Starbucks…

Also, looking at the other apps that are $50+, we think that we’re of at least comparable in utility and functionality, if not more. And, part of what the company is also doing is making a statement about the non-trivial nature of WolframAlpha’s capabilities, what we are bringing to the iPhone in terms of making it a more useful device, and how much the system has matured since launch.

When internet radio purveyor Pandora launched its iPhone app it transformed the company and sent it on the road to mainstream visibility and increased revenues. A similar though less spectacular gain might be in order for Wolfram, but for the price. Nonetheless the $50 price tag was a bold statement about the value of the app. And there may be some discounting in the future. We’ll have to wait and see.

By the same token the price has certainly gotten everyone’s attention and thus probably generated more coverage than the app might otherwise have if it had been free. I don’t think that was part of the plan exactly but it may work to get more people to take a closer look . . . and a few of them to shell out the big money.

Wolfram|Alpha, the very impressive fact engine, has announced their new API that will allow third-parties to access and display results from their database.

The API is priced out with three tiers:

• Developer & Personal Use Plans
• Small & Medium Business Plans (up to 750,000 requests per month)
• Enterprise Plans (over a million requests per month)

The data within Wolfram|Alpha is rich and detailed, where many search engines, universities, businesses and individuals can benefit from on some level.

There have been rumors of a private API for a while now, some suspected a deal with Bing in the past.

Not long ago “computational engine” Wolfram Alpha struck a deal with Microsoft to license some of its data to Bing. Now, according to the Guardian UK, Wolfram is going wide with that strategy and will soon enable an API that third parties can use to create mashups or enhance their sites.

This may be a step toward monetization and/or an admission that as a “search destination” it’s foundering.

Wolfram today has a defined range of data (see the Wikipedia list), making it unpredictable for those not familiar with its capabilities and limitations. Chris and Danny both wrote positive reviews of the site.

By juxtaposing itself with Google or positioning itself as superior to Google in a number of ways, Wolfram created some confusion (and disappointment) in the market. People showed up and didn’t know how to use it, incorrectly assuming it was a search engine.

Now let’s see what others can do with the data.

A little more than three months after its launch, Wolfram Alpha is getting smarter, bigger (in a couple ways), and busier. That’s the word from Stephen Wolfram in a blog post about the site’s progress so far. Not mentioned in his post is an unconfirmed report from TechCrunch that Wolfram Alpha also has a licensing deal with Bing.

Wolfram says one of the main challenges his fact engine has faced so far is in how people type queries:

“Close to half the time that Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t give a result, it’s not because it doesn’t have the necessary knowledge, or can’t do the necessary computation. It’s because it doesn’t understand what’s being asked.”

To that point, Wolfram says the team has “reduced the ‘fall-through rate’ of queries we don’t understand by 10%.” In addition to getting smarter, Wolfram says the project is also getting bigger: the development team is growing, as is the site’s codebase, which has more than two million new lines of code.

But there’s no mention of the reported licensing deal with Bing. TechCrunch says Wolfram Alpha will share some of its data with Microsoft’s new search engine. A Microsoft email says the company is not confirming the report, and a Wolfram Alpha spokesperson refused our request for comment.

The WolframAlpha Blog announced they have launched an iPhone mobile friendly version of their search engine. If you visit www.wolframalpha.com on your iPhone, you should see an iPhone friendly home screen. It looks like this:

The issue is, if you conduct any search, it doesn’t give you an iPhone friendly version of the results page. Yes, the iPhone loads the normal page just find, but I find it weird to announce an iPhone version of a search engine when the search results are not specifically iPhone friendly. Here is a picture of a search results page, which I had to pinch to look good:

The Wolfram|Alpha blog announced that they will be updating their index of structured data today. In fact, they gave a very detailed explanation of what exactly they are updating. Unlike, Google, Yahoo or Bing, Wolfram’s updates are not necessarily web crawls, but rather Wolfram uses sources of data to build their index and provide structured answers.

Here are the details of what Wolfram|Alpha is updating:

• Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions
• More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. "US military vs. UK")
• Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. "germany gdp vs population")
• More complete handling of government positions (e.g. "chancellor", etc.)
• Updates to country borders for India, China, Slovenia, Croatia, and others
• Updates to naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions
• Additional subcountry regions (e.g. "Wales"); many more to come
• Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. "Iran time")
• City-by-city handling of U.S. states with multiple timezones
• Updates to certain European currencies (e.g. for "Cyprus" and "Slovakia")
• Some additional historical events; many more to come
• Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. "2 or 3 aces")
• Additional output for partitions of integers (e.g. "partitions of 47")
• Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. "ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2")
• Additional support for Mathematica 3D graphics syntax
• Additional support for stock prices with explicit dates
• Support for planet-to-planet distances and “nearest planet”, etc.
• Extra information when comparing incompatible units (e.g. "ergs vs. newtons")
• Improved linguistic handling for many foods (e.g. "love apple")
• More mountains added, especially in Australia
• Support for many less-common given names (e.g. "zebulon")
• More “self-aware” questions answered (e.g. "how old are you")
• More consistent handling of sidebar links to Wikipedia, etc.

Have a look at an Internet first: “computational knowledge ads” on Wolfram Alpha. (We can’t call them “search ads” if it’s not a search engine, now can we?)

Gary Price tipped us to the presence of an ad for Lenovo’s ThinkPad appearing on what appears to be mainly math-related queries. The screenshot above is from a search for “pi”. At first, the ad only appears as the small box in the right-side column; when you mouseover the ad, the larger pop-over ad appears. I should mention that the ad only appeared the first time I ran the query.

In its FAQS, Wolfram Alpha talks about accepting advertising:

Does Wolfram|Alpha accept advertising?

At present, Wolfram|Alpha is concentrating on major corporate sponsorships. In the future, there may be opportunities for more targeted advertising. Contact us for information.

It’s anyone’s guess what ads on Wolfram Alpha are selling for, but having a major sponsor within days of launch? That’s priceless.

The already much discussed Wolfram Alpha official launch is Monday May 18, though the company has said they plan a “soft launch” starting tonight, with access gradually becoming available to everyone throughout the weekend. Some members of the press, like myself, have been able to directly use a preview version to test it out.

Expect to see a flurry of press coverage over the coming days relentlessly pursuing the angle of Wolfram Alpha being a potential “Google killer.” It’s not, and in fact Stephen Wolfram, founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, has tried to deflect the comparisons to Google. But given what we’ve seen with the introduction of other new information-finding services, such as the disastrous launch of Cuil, the comparisons seem inevitable.

“We are not a search engine. No searching is involved here,” Wolfram told Danny Sullivan in Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”. “The types of things that people are currently searching for have some overlap [with Google], but it isn’t huge. What’s exciting is that we have a whole new class of things that people can put into a input field and have it tell them what it knows.”

In his post, Danny offered a comprehensive overview of Wolfram Alpha based on demos and his conversation with Stephen Wolfram. He wrote:

“Wolfram Alpha is backed by Stephen Wolfram, the noted scientist and author behind the Mathematica computational software and the book, A New Kind Of Science. The service bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” which is a mouthful. I’d call it a “fact search engine” or perhaps an “answer search engine,” a term that’s been used in the past for services designed to provide you with direct answers, rather than point you at pages that in turn may hold those answers.”

So, to borrow an old advertising tagline from 7-Up, you might call Wolfram Alpha the “un-Google.”

I’ve been playing around with Wolfram Alpha for a couple of days. In all, I agree with Danny’s “impressive” verdict. And it functions in a way that’s very different than any other search engine I’ve ever used. Even beyond impressive, the words that best describe the experience of using Wolfram Alpha are “fun” and “enchanting.”

Wolfram Alpha’s interface allows you to enter queries in natural language. It then tries to disambiguate your query and present relevant facts, charts, illustrations and other supporting “tools.” If it can’t understand your query, you’ll see a “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” message, Sometimes it doesn’t have enough information to work with; in these cases you see a “development of this topic is under investigation…” message.

The system also does intelligent things with non-query related information. For example, in calculating distance or physical space, it infers your location (presumably by reading your computer’s IP address) and adjusts numeric or chart/graph data accordingly.

When you’re first starting out using Wolfram Alpha, I’d recommend checking out the hundreds of pre-populated “examples” to see how certain types of queries are best structured. Many of these examples feature structured input fields (for example, weights, measures, dates, and so on) so you can express your question more specifically than with natural language.

Here are some examples showing what Wolfram Alpha can do that would be difficult to impossible to do in Google—or any other search engine, for that matter. You’ll be able to replicate these once Wolfram Alpha is available to everyone; I’m showing screen shots (rather than including links) because I’m working with preproduction test servers rather than the final system set to be launched later today.

I’m also focusing on categories that aren’t traditionally regarded as computationally intensive. Wolfram|Alpha excels at any type of numeric calculation, but it’s also surprisingly good at “computing” information with non-numeric data.

Historical event

Note the dates, relevant facts, and map for Hurricane Delores in 1966.

Musical notation

This is a wonderful feature for anyone learning to play an instrument. Not only are notes for a B-flat minor seventh chord depicted in three different ways, there are also links to play either the individual notes or the complete chord.

Drug information

Everything you want to know about your favorite pharmaceuticals, chemical compounds, and other substances.

Geography

Great for students or crossword puzzle solvers.

Nutrition & Food

Tempted to go off that diet?

Colors

Whether you’re painting your house or designing a web site.

Useful for certain SEOs…

You know who you are… :-)

What about Google?

Google can’t do many of these types of things using a single query—yet. At the recent Google Searchology event, a new experimental feature called “Google Squared” was demoed. Although it’s nowhere near as ambitious as Wolfram Alpha, Google Squared is trying to do similar things—essentially, trying to structure the data it finds on the web and present it in a spreadsheet-like results format. For a quick demo, check out What Is Google Squared? It Is How Google Will Crush Wolfram Alpha (Exclusive Video). Danny also has some thoughts about Google Squared in Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts.

So Google is working on it—and Google Squared will be released as an experiment in Google Labs later this month). For now, Wolfram Alpha is an entirely different beast than Google or any search engine, but nevertheless is something that most people are going to find incredibly useful when looking for facts.

Want to get on Wolfram Alpha as soon as you can? The company plans to broadcast its launch starting at about 7pm CDT. The company is also adding frequent updates to the Wolfram Alpha blog.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: Chris mentioned my Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts post, and I wanted to add the portion relevant to Wolfram Alpha here:

Moreover, since my initial Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” post, I’ve had a chance to use a live private version of the service directly. I already knew (as my original review mentions) that it had many gaps in its knowledge base. But running more queries also shows that even if Wolfram Alpha has information, you might not find it, if you haven’t asked in the right way. I’m doing a future post to explain this more.

I’m not sure if I’ll get to that longer look before the service actually goes live. When it does, it will be self-evident to many how much it misses (try “california tax revenue” or “gun deaths in united states” as examples of gaps in its knowledge). I’m still positive that it’s an impressive resource for dedicated searchers. But as I also wrote in my original review of the demo, it still faces a hefty awareness challenge to pull in ordinary searches that it hopes also to appeal to.

One of the more interesting things to me that came out of the Google Searchology event this week was “Google Squared.” It’s a new search tool launching later this month that tries to build spreadsheet-like answers to anything you search for. I had a few screenshots from the event that take a deeper look that I wanted to share, plus how it compares to the forthcoming Wolfram Alpha fact engine.

Google Squared (it’ll launch here in the future) allows you to search, then it compiles results in tabular form — rows and columns. For any search, Google examines the pages that it finds and tries to figure out what’s the best way to tabularize the information — IE, to put it in a structured, orderly form.

Sometimes, Google Squared’s guesses are impressive. When I asked it about “baseball stadiums,” I got back this table:

You can see how major stadiums are all listed, along with an image of them, the current manager of the baseball team, the capacity of the stadium, the type of playing surface and so on.

Google makes its best guess at the values for each of the columns, and it knows these might not be right. That’s why you can click on any value to see the underlying source and change to another likely value or search for more, if you want:

Similarly, if you get an initial table and feel you want to customize it with information that Google’s not found, you can add to it. For example, see this “great lakes” search:

Lake Erie is missing from the list above, I think (if I remember correctly) this is because Google associate project manager Alex Komoroske purposely deleted it to demonstrate how you can add to a table like this:

Clicking on the “Add Items” link lets you bring in other information. I can’t recall, but I think when you do this, Google will also populate all the columns in the table for that item with its best guess at values relating to it.

Here’s another search, for “national parks,” this time:

Here’s another one, for “science fiction tv shows,”

The service, when live, will be part of Google Labs. That means it’s an experiment, not really intended for prime time searching. And as Google itself readily admits, there’s plenty of ways it trips up.

Here’s a search for “battlestar galactica,”

You can see “Item Name” shows the name of episodes that are listed. When creating tables, Google Squared’s algorithm tries to guess at what are common attributes about items that it thinks are worth listing. In this case, it clearly figured out that for “battlestar galactica,” the common items to list would be episodes. But the algorithm flubbed on knowing that it should have gone with “Episode Name” rather than “Item Name” for that particular column.

You can also see that for the “Written By” and “Directed By” columns, it is missing several values. As said earlier, in these cases, someone could edit the empty boxes to add information, then save that as a personal “Square” for future use.

More issues — I don’t think you can sort the columns, nor does Google Squared put any particular sorting scheme to them, that I can see. In the example above, the items aren’t listed by episode name or date — you just get a bunch of items. From long experience in working with tables, I can tell you that a clear order is essential for anyone hoping to understand the information at a glance.

I said it was experimental, though, right?

Here’s a search for “piers,” where real piers oddly get mixed with Australian states that have piers in them:

A search for “california piers” is more relevant, though with one of the columns called “Venice Pier,” it doesn’t make sense. Venice Pier should be one of the rows — one of the items listed, not a value for items:

In a search for “search engines,” you get a mishmash of information that’s not really useful:

And while you can change some of the values, it’s not even clear what you might be changing them to:

A natural thought is that Google Squared might be great for product comparisons. We’ll see — Google has a dedicated product search now that even has a “grid view” display, so I don’t really see this as a replacement for that. But curious, I tried “cell phone plans,” to see how it might handle virtual products where you often want a comparison. It didn’t do well:

A real stumper — could it show me the type of cell phones that Jack Bauer has used over time? I know of at least three different types he’s used — could Google Square datamine that? Nope:

Overall, don’t expect perfection from Google Squared. Far from it. But as Google’s Matt Cutts pointed out, it can be kind of addictive to play with.

Squaring Off Against Wolfram Alpha

Naturally, there continue to be comparisons with Google Squared to Wolfram Alpha, which is expected to launch as early as tomorrow. Is this more of Google trying to steal Wolfram’s thunder, as some felt when Google rolled out it release of chartable public data on US population and unemployment rates late last month?

Yes and no.

Google Squared wasn’t whipped up overnight. Many months ago, I saw an early version of the product. Similarly, Google structured data search didn’t just happen in the matter of days. These were projects well in the works before Wolfram Alpha gained recent attention.

Still, a decision was made to release both to the public ahead of the Wolfram launch. While Google really didn’t plan for the structured data search news to break during Wolfram’s first public demo (a product manager’s wife went into labor, moving things around unexpectedly), Google did decide that the timing was right generally to show the world it could deal with structured data in a way that Wolfram was going to do. That ensures any story about Wolfram doesn’t have an angle of “Google can’t do it.” Instead, it guarantees a change of emphasis to “Google’s working on the same.”

Google Squared, in a way, goes one better than what Wolfram Alpha is doing. Wolfram’s data comes from taking in structured data. As a result, there are lots of questions it doesn’t know about. And while the human curation of this data helps in accuracy, doing a search and coming up with nothing is a disquieting feeling.

Moreover, since my initial Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” post, I’ve had a chance to use a live private version of the service directly. I already knew (as my original review mentions) that it had many gaps in its knowledge base. But running more queries also shows that even if Wolfram Alpha has information, you might not find it, if you haven’t asked in the right way. I’m doing a future post to explain this more.

So neither service is perfect, and they will compete to each other to some degree — and that’s fine. With luck, the competition will help us see better ways of finding both structured data (stuff you get in columns and rows) plus ways to organize the unstructured world that way.

Finally, TechCrunch has a video of Google Squared in action.