The PC Report

Wolfram Alpha is quite possibly the best maths and computational tool available on the internet. The Wolfram|Alpha “Computational Knowledge Engine” is basically an intelligent search engine that instead of outputting sites for you to visit based on search keywords, it works out solutions and answers, and gives information based on what you’ve entered.

For example, enter the parabolic equation y=x^2+3x+5 and it’ll graph it for you. If you enter death michael jackson it will find the date of his death and post information about that date. Enter gdp australia and it will output info about Australia’s GDP. There are so many more uses, you should just try it out for yourself – head over to Wolfram Alpha now.

Haven’t seen it yet or tested it yourself? Well, you can now just by entering this simple Javascript code into your address bar. To get it working, head over to google.com, paste the following code into your address bar when on the Google homepage, press Enter then refresh the page to enjoy the new look search.

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Note that it doesn’t work on country-code prefixes of Google, such as .co.uk and .au – you’ll need to head over to the plain google.com to enjoy the new look. Oh, and if your sick of the new look, just find and delete the above from your Google cookies, or just delete all your cookies.

Update: There are reports that this no longer works. However, still try it for yourself.

If you are a regular Bing user, unlike me, then you should be quite happy to hear that Microsoft has begun rolling out the next big update to its search engine that launched in June. One of the major updates to Bing is the partnership with Wolfram Alpha, which should incorporate some of the computational features of Wolfram into the Bing search engine. This inclusion is helped along by the new Wolfram Alpha API that was released recently.

Also in the list of new features in Bing 2.0 are localised results for weather and events, an updated and improved Bing Shopping, and the “next generation” of the Hover Preview features that lets you view snapshots of websites before you actually go to them. While the updates to the servers being today, we may not see any of this new content for a few days, and the Wolfram Alpha feature may not be implemented for a few weeks.

Bing Videos is also getting some spotlight today as it is set to be the replacement for MSN Videos, with all the MSN Video content being slowly incorporated and rebranded into Bing Videos. It aims to be a great video centre for your video content, as videos are retrieved from several well known sites such as YouTube and Hulu as well as the MSN video database. Again, the updates are starting now and will be finished in the near future.

According to a report by Nielson, 10.7% of searches Americans made in August were with Microsoft’s Bing, behind Google (which rose to 64.6%) and Yahoo (which fell to 16%).

The results of Bing’s increase isn’t all too surprising because Microsoft is estimated to have spent $80 to $100 million in advertising since setting up Bing, and it looks like its only set to increase, thanks to the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo where Yahoo’s back-end search will be replaced by Bing and have “powered by Bing” branding.

It’s a shame that Bing only indexes a mere 11 pages of The PC Report, although it’s probably a good thing that Google as some competition to keep it on its toes.

If you’ve been loyal to a single search engine for a long time, perhaps its time to see if you might like the results of another more!

Blindsearch, the “search engine taste test”, allows you to see the results of a query from Google, Yahoo and Bing side-by-side and unlabelled and does not reveal which search engine is which until you vote for your favorite results. You never know – they might surprise you.

As a long-time Google user (18960 searches are logged in my Google web history), I was a little surprised to find that for the first 5 searches I made, I prefer Bing’s results. Still, given the numbers 5 vs 18960, it’s going to take some more convincing. The overall results show that Google still shows the best results by voting percentages:

“Results: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%. ”

With the experimental nature of the site, the statistics probably aren’t a perfect reflection.

The Blindsearch admin (a Microsoft employee), also mentions the most popular search terms on the post linked above. Surely there must be some other uses for image search.