Bing Adds Wolfram Alpha to Search Results

Microsoft seems to have decided that this week is “roll out new features” week for its upstart search engine Bing. Yesterday the search engine infused new features into Bing Maps, and it also transformed MSN Video into Bing Video.

Today is no different. The search engine has just launched a trio of new features, headlined by one major addition that has been in the works for months: integration with the Wolfram Alpha Computational Engine.

For those who may not remember Wolfram Alpha , it garnered major hyped as a potentially new form of search. It received a lot of buzz at its launch, but the initial traffic spike has leveled off. Wolfram Alpha actually doesn’t search the web, but instead computes results based on your inputs (i.e. What’s the Biggest Country in the world?).

Now that computational power is part of Bing. When you search for food or nutritional information, you’ll be presented with Wolfram Alpha’s data on its calories, ingredients, composition, nutritional data, and more. Wolfram Alpha also appears when you type in equations. We’ve seen this integration before, and it is slick. Here’s a screenshot:

Bing also has added two other features: enhanced hover preview and full-page weather and event results. Hovering over any search result now includes a snapshot of the website in question, the most-clicked links of that website, the ability to search within that specific site, and longer text snippets. All of this gives you information before you even click.

In addition, weather results are now enhanced with a wide array of weather forecasts and details. There’s also a video of this in action (but you’re going to need Silverlight):

Bing continues to pile on the features as it tries to make headway against Google. The thing is though, all of these features are very useful and create a compelling reason to switch. And they’re not done yet: we know that more features are on their way this week, so tune in for our additional coverage.

Tags: bing