Bing!

So Microsoft has a new search engine called "Bing," apparently intended to replace Live Search. (Meanwhile I'm still wondering what happened to Live Search Academic).

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear this word is the Ned Ryerson character in "Groundhog Day" using it repeatedly as in "Ned Ryerson, got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn't graduate! Bing! Ned Ryerson, dated your sister Mary until you told me not to. Bing!"

So I guess the word is being used appropriately to denote the "aha" moment, the "sound of found," as Microsoft says.

The site itself is not available yet; it goes live next week. Microsoft has apparently been previewing the functionality to the press, and there are several reviews available.

Searchengineland.com (Posted using ShareThis) has a particularly thorough review including a search-by-search comparison of Bing and Google.

Computerworld also has a nice hands on review titled "Hands on with Microsoft Bing" (also Posted using ShareThis)

Finally, there's a more newsy piece on the release in the New York Times.

WolframAlpha

The New York Times today talks about a new search engine from Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica software. The engine is not a Google/Yahoo-like web crawler, but rather a query interface to a large collection of data. WolframAlpha can answer queries like "ldl 120," for example, with charts of cholesterol levels in the U.S. population. This kind of search engine is less of a competitor and more of a complement to search engines like Google.