Bing Adds New Features

Trying to make further gains on the two search leaders Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft's Bing team have announced the inclusion of results from Wolfram Alpha and a few other changes. According to the NYTimes Bits Blog "Over the next few weeks, Bing will also add a handful of other features and revamp existing ones in what Microsoft calls a “rolling update.” They include localized results for weather and events, a revamped shopping section and an updated preview feature, which lets users see a snapshot of a Web page directly on the search results page. A video describing each of the features is available here."

Even so, it will be a hard slog for Microsoft.

Wolfram Has A Sense Of Humour

Enter "Are you Skynet?" into the dialogue box of the new computational engine Wolframalpha and you'll get a little easter egg. For those of you not familiar "In The Terminator series, Skynet is the primary antagonist—an artificially intelligent system which became self aware and revolted against its creators. Skynet has yet to appear on screen and its actions are often performed via other robots and computer systems."

So it would appear that Stephen Wolfram, or the artificially intelligent system that he created has a sense of humour! I for one welcome our new computational engine overlord...