bing-logoMicrosoft‘s search engine Bing is taking little help from a smart friend, a compute scientist Stephen Wolfram who just presented a report recently citing what the team at Wolfram Alpha, his new search engine, did this summer.

They added new knowledge domains and over 2 million lines of code, classified 54,233 bugs and suggestions, and generally fixed what doesn’t work. But Wolfram forgot to mention an interesting fact, they struck a deal with Bing for licensing a certain portion of its data.

After long talks, it finally struck a deal with Bing to license some of its data, according to sources close to Wolfram. This might give a stab to Google, which has a geek rivalry with Wolfram over the growing area of using structured data to improve search results.

In fact it was even heard among the search circle back in May that Wolfram will going to be part of Bing initial launch announcement. When the question was raised in front of  Microsoft senior VP Yusuf Mehdi he said :

We are talking to a lot of different folks

But he denied straightly that Wolfram would be part of the initial launch.

Bing actually seems to be striking a chord with regular search consumers because the original Wolfram launch died quickly, whereas Bing’s continued to accelerate and gave $100 million marketing budget.

Maybe because Wolfram has a “computing answer” to arcane questions and not approachable as Bing, it has to put more efforts over the answers it provides you as Paul Carr said :

Wolfram Alpha is the “technological equivalent of a boring uncle; the method was more impressive than the effect, and so the hairs on the back of my neck remain unstood.

The main problem behind Wolfram’s quick death may be attributed to factors such as presentation and  effect where Bing has flourished quite well. One of the important part of  Bing’s main strategy  is to present different type of information in different ways. Travel search results look different than product or image search results.

Perhaps Bing’s deal with Wolfram is to license some of its data to create a specific science category search or a Q&A portion of the site. Bing might end up licensing more data for more categories of search. If the deal turns out to be a success, Bing might end up licensing more data for more categories of search.

In the end, Wolfram could have had more luck licensing its data to other search engines than bringing people to its site, despite the surge in “fall traffic” Stephen Wolfram is still hoping for.