[ExI] Google has incorporated Wolfram Alpha search results

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On Sat, 2009-05-23 at 23:02 +0000, BillK wrote:
> When you do a Google search, Google now automatically feeds the same
> query into Wolfram Alpha as well and includes their results if any
> useful answer is found.
> This generally only applies to maths type queries.
> 
> For example, if you search on x^2+sin(x)
> the Wolfram results are the third in the list.
> 
> So this means that you never have to do a specific Wolfram search.
> They probably won't like that much!  ;)
> 
I'm pretty sure they don't just feed the query you just put in to
Wolfram.   That would never work in real time, especially because Google
is probably about 20 times faster than Wolfram at responding. They are
likely only giving you back the queries that were popular that had
something useful on Wolfram, or it might even be Wolfram feeding this to
the Google crawler through the robot.txt file.

eg try:
x^2 +sin(x)+1284*cos(x)

You won't get anything back about Wolfram in Google (I assume. I tried
something similar just before, but I don't want to pollute the cache
with the exact query).  So you never have to go to Wolfram as long as
you keep putting queries from an example list.

Wolfram are most likely perfectly ok with this behaviour.  They could
relatively easily block Google's IPs if they didn't like the attention.
(Try creating a search engine that just returns Google's results without
coming to an arrangement with Google, and see how long it keeps
working).

Finally, Google claim to have their own project (Google squared) to do
something similar.