[ExI] Google has incorporated Wolfram Alpha search results

[BillK]

On 5/24/09, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:
> 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).


After more playing, you are correct. Google isn't doing a Wolfram
search. But Google must be finding that Wolfram result from somewhere.
Even other similar simple equations do not produce any Wolfram
results. Maybe that particular equation is a special Wolfram example.
It is in the Google cache from 21st May, but it does link to a real
Wolfram page.

Also, thinking more about it, Wolfram is very picky about the way you
ask a question, so it is unlikely that the same search phrase would
suit both Google and Wolfram.

So we still have to use both search engines as appropriate.  :)

BillK