Microsoft unveils new web search engine called “Bing”

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft on Thursday unveiled a new Web search engine, Bing, designed to intuitively understand what people are seeking on the Internet and challenge online king Google. The US software colossus described Bing as a "Decision Engine" and said it will be deployed worldwide at Bing.com by Wednesday. Bing's launch comes in the wake of Google and Yahoo! announcing refinements to their search services and the launch of a Wolfram Alpha query engine that delivers answers instead of lists of websites. "Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer. "When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web." Bing relies predominately on algorithms and key words to provide results for online searches but has infused some semantic technology that deduces intended meanings of phrases, according to Microsoft. "The Bing service is a first step," said Whitney Burk, director of communications for Bing. "We still have plenty of work to do and we are excited to get it out into the wild next week." Bing will replace MSN Live Search, which has languished in a distant third place behind market-leading Google and second-place Yahoo! Bing is vastly better than Microsoft's Live but doesn't outshine Google when it comes to general Internet search, according to analyst Matt Rosoff of private firm Directions On Microsoft. "They want to give you more information without having to click through to a lot of other sites," said Rosoff, who has used Bing during the past month as part of a Microsoft test program. "I like it, but I don't think it will get me to switch from Google entirely. They are not naive to the scope of the challenge. They are going to keep throwing money at it for awhile." The search engine is aimed at online shoppers and will initially focus on helping people make buying decisions, plan trips, research health matters, or find local businesses. For example, people using Bing to shop online will automatically be provided product reviews and those planning trips will get information regarding travel bargains. Bing has a "Best Match" feature that identifies and gives high priority to answers that seem to best fit queries. "Quick Tabs" that appear automatically on search results pages recommend query refinements. As examples, searches on cities could trigger tabs for information regarding weather or tourist attractions while queries on films might prompt tabs for movie sound tracks or actor biographies. Semantic technology is used for online research quests on topics along the lines of "Was Albert Einstein married?" Documents or videos can be previewed without clicking through to links. "The most popular button in search today is the 'Back' button," Burk said. " "You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to find something on the Internet . Bing is really designed to help people narrow in on things faster and make smarter decisions." Bing gives Microsoft "a leg up" on competitors but is more likely to lure users from Yahoo! because "Google is too much of a habit for everyone," Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk said in a blog post. "Microsoft's Bing will change the face of search," VanBoskirk wrote. "Bing focuses on delivering answers, not Web pages." In what is a growing online search trend, Bing delves into websites to summarize what they have to offer in easily scanned preview boxes. "We are trying to surface functionality right to the top so people don't have to look for it quite so hard," Burk said. Microsoft cited study results indicating that an estimated 30 percent of online searches are abandoned out of frustration and that searchers often fail to get what they seek on a first try.

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Wolfram Alpha is Coming......

Wolfram Alpha- A new search engine which will left Google behind.

Mathematica has been a great success in very broadly handling all kinds of formal technical systems and knowledge.
But what about everything else? What about all other systematic knowledge? All the methods and models, and data, that exists?
Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things.
And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.
But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.
I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.
I had two crucial ingredients: Mathematica and NKS. With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules.
But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?
A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.
But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.
So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.
But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.
It’s not easy to do this. Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.
But, OK. Let’s say we succeed in creating a system that knows a lot, and can figure a lot out. How can we interact with it?
The way humans normally communicate is through natural language. And when one’s dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that’s the only realistic option for communicating with computers too.
Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.
But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding.
All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do.
Of course, even that has never been done in any generality. And it’s made more difficult by the fact that one doesn’t just want to handle a language like English: one also wants to be able to handle all the shorthand notations that people in every possible field use.
I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work.
Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task.
It’s certainly the most complex project I’ve ever undertaken. Involving far more kinds of expertise—and more moving parts—than I’ve ever had to assemble before.
And—like Mathematica, or NKS—the project will never be finished.
But I’m happy to say that we’ve almost reached the point where we feel we can expose the first part of it.
It’s going to be a website: http://www.wolframalpha.com/. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.
We’re all working very hard right now to get WolframAlpha ready to go live.
I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web.
That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!

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