Answering your questions with Bing and Wolfram Alpha
Have your kids ever asked you a question for a school paper or homework that you wish you knew? Have you given an answer that you “think” you remember from your days in school, knowing that the information you were about to give might be very outdated?
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff of a deal that was struck quietly a year earlier, when TechCrunch reported Wolfram Alpha had struck an agreement with Bing during its first summer of adding knowledge domains and millions of lines of code. What was then a rumor-adjacent partnership is now a shipped product feature: Bing serves Wolfram Alpha's computed answers directly for factual and homework-style queries.
First-order effects
- Students and parents typing homework and factual questions into Bing now get Wolfram Alpha's computed answers on the results page instead of a list of links to verify themselves.
- Wolfram Alpha gains distribution it could never buy with its own site traffic or its $50 iPhone app, which drew criticism precisely because the free website undercut it.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to match direct-answer capability in the query types where Bing now leads with structured computation rather than ranked pages.
- Other structured-knowledge providers become acquisition or licensing targets, since the fastest way for a search engine to add answer depth is to rent someone else's curated domains.
Third-order effects
- The move points toward search economics where the answer itself, not the click-through, is the product — forcing engines to license authoritative sources and shifting bargaining power toward content owners who can supply them.
The trend: Search is shifting from ranking links to serving licensed, computed answers, with Bing using partnerships like Wolfram Alpha to differentiate against Google's scale.