MS Ba-da-BING

Microsoft is launching it's new search engine: Bing.com
It can't be any worse than Live Search - which is awful. Competing with Google is always going to be a challenge. As I've blogged about recently Wolfram-Alpha is taking on the search giant, but with a different slant on searching.
Bing will try to be intelligent about searches, by using the current date, time etc. to make your search results more relevant. It will also provide related search results and search terms.

It's explained well with examples here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/may/28/microsoft-bing

EDIT
More information here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/28/microsoft-search-bing-google

EDIT 2
And more about how it works:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/29/microsoft-bing-search-engine

WolframAlpha in action

Check out WolframAlpha in action:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/see_wolfram_alpha_in_action_-_video_and_screenshots.php

Wolfram hype builds

The excitement surrounding the new way to search from Stephen Wolfram: Wolframalpha is building as they show special persons in private, and now in public.

He claims the search will be a new "paradigm for the web", by answering your questions more directly. Using various Natural Language Processing algorithms it tries to give you a direct answer to your question, rather than a bunch of sites that happen to mention those words.

I believe that this is another step towards a semantic web, as I've previously blogged about. This being the search end of things, whose job can only be made easier by good mark-up, and well-structured and organised data on web-pages. The future of online is about giving all this data out there on the web some meaning.

Any Question Answered may soon be a thing of the past, if we've all got the web on our phones and Wolframalpha!

BBC article explaining more about Wolframalpha.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026331.stm

The search engine:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The crazy genius that is Stephen Wolfram:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/