Bing: Microsoft’s Answer To Wolfram Alpha?

I was watching an impressive commercial on TV last night. It was about a new search engine, one that would answer your question, one that was one of the most powerful, one that didn’t give you a waste of responses to your search and multiple pages worth of websites that just matched the keywords in your search. I immediately thought to myself that Wolfram Alpha must be doing commercials now – I was wrong; it was Microsoft’s Bing.

According to CNET, “the engine, which replaces Live Search, debuted Thursday at the D: All Things Digital conference and is slated to be fully available by Wednesday. (Microsoft said it would start becoming publicly available Monday, but that it wouldn’t be fully launched until Wednesday.) ” Experts believe this is Microsoft’s way of getting to trying to be Google, but others think this is a smart move for Microsoft who has not had the best history in regards to building a popular search engine.

So what makes Bing so different? A few things. “Bing’s video preview feature–known as smart motion preview–is one of the selling points Microsoft has used to try to get momentum behind its revamped search engine. But the company acknowledged that corporate customers had expressed a desire to enforce stronger search filters within their networks, and so it is giving those network administrators as well as individual users on a home network the ability to add a string of text to Bing queries that automatically enforces the strictest search settings regardless of the user’s individual setting.”

The live preview of videos from a video search is impressive, but I’m not sure if Bing will beat Google or even Wolfram Alpha which debuted a few weeks prior. Time shall tell!