Wolfram Alpha Updates Its Progress; Also Has Deal With Bing?

Aug 21, 2009 at 5:17pm ET by Matt McGee

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.

Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

See more articles by Matt McGee >

Share, Bookmark & Discuss This Article
More:

See more stories like this in the Members Library! Check out the Microsoft: Bing, Microsoft: Partnerships, Search Engines: Wolfram Alpha sections of the Members Library where this story is filed. Members also get access to exclusive video content, a members-only weekly & monthly newsletter, plus more. Check out all the benefits!

FREE DAILY SEARCH NEWS RECAP!