Microsoft's recent Bing release
impressed the Tech Crowd

Bing is a Decision Engine to help you cut through Internet clutter to make faster, more informed decisions.

In the last few weeks we have had Wolfram Alpha offering a way to search structured data and provide results in a form suitable for further computation.
We have had Google Squared promising a simple way of pulling organised data from websites into a spreadsheet style format.

And now, after years of effort, billions of dollars worth of investment and several failed attempts, Microsoft has launched Bing, a search engine that it thinks has a chance of unseating Google and which it would like us to think of as a "decision engine".

Microsoft will have a "big budget" to spend on marketing Bing, Ballmer said, adding that he "gulped" when he had to approve the request. Advertising Age reported that Microsoft plans to spend $100 million on a campaign for Bing.

Though Powerset only joined Microsoft in August 2008, it is very proud of its contributions so far. Long before the acquisition of Powerset, Microsoft’s search team was hard at work building the infrastructure and technology to make Bing possible. There'll be more information posted about the Powerset integration into Bing.

Read more:
http://www.bing...blogs/powerset/
http://www.marketwatch.com/
http://www.economist.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.techcrunch.com/
http://www.ft.com/cms/

Recently started Wolfram Alpha now aims to expand Field of Knowledge

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine but a "computational knowledge engine"

Wolfram Alpha's launch was marred by technical glitches and widespread disappointment that the engine was too focused on scientific data to appeal to the general audience that uses Google.

The push to expand its scope of knowledge will help correct a key weakness. Wolfram said his team is tapping additional databases containing financial information, historical affairs, real estate trends, weather data, real-time flight tracking, obituaries and local data. He said users have requested more legal and bibliographic information. "It has humans in the loop trying to make it smarter," he said. "We're not going to let Wolfram Alpha loose to let it learn on its own. Too many things can go wrong that way." Again he downplayed suggestions his software was a rival to traditional search engines from Google, Yahoo Inc. or Microsoft.

As of now, Wolfram Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Wolfram Alpha, as it exists today, is just the beginning. We have both short- and long-term plans to dramatically expand all aspects of Wolfram|Alpha, broadening and deepening our data, our computation, our linguistics, our presentation, and more.

According to guardian.co.uk, it is not really doing any natural language processing - that is, in Wolfram's words, the engine actually gets rid of "pure linguistic fluffery" and really just understands keywords and operators. He expects people to quickly stop using natural language and start using the relevant jargon.

See more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://online.wsj.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/