Exclusive: Details on Microsoft's New Search Partnership With Wolfram Alpha

From DailyTech: We've been following Wolfram Alpha for since its introduction as this search engine promises to open search to dramatically new realms, such as math and the sciences. Located in Champaign, Illinois, Wolfram Research produces Wolfram Alpha. Founded by Stephen Wolfram, Ph.D, the company's past works have included Mathematica and Wolfram Workbench, utilities commonly employed by college students and researchers.

Wolfram Alpha returns answers to complex questions like plots of mathematical functions, geometric shapes, nutritional information, and more. Previously, these results had been offered solely through Wolfram's search engine site. There had been some recent chatter that Wolfram was working on APIs for other search engine firms to use, but the results remained unrevealed -- until now.

Microsoft and Wolfram Research just announced that Microsoft's Bing search engine will bring the Wolfram API onboard to provide richer search results. Wolfram's blog describes, "Wolfram|Alpha provides immediate, unbiased, and individualized information, making it distinctly different from what has traditionally been found through web search. By using Wolfram|Alpha, Bing recognizes the complementary benefits of bringing computational knowledge to the forefront of the search experience... By using our API, Bing will be able to seamlessly access the tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of data from Wolfram|Alpha, and directly incorporate the computations in its search results."

The Wolfram team relates a humorous story of Stephen Wolfram presenting the engine to Microsoft's senior executives. Stephen Wolfram typed in the query "2^2^2^2^2" and a number popped up. Semi-retired founder and former CEO Bill Gates inquired, "What, is that right?"

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