The accuracy of a search engine is dependent on the accuracy of its data set; that is the rationale. Google has announced that it now utilises public data directly from the World Bank to display results and graphs for questions like: “people per capita in U.S.A” or the number of “internet users in Australia or U.S.A”. Google has access to the official 17 World Development indicators and is easily comparable between different countries and other variables. This is in addition to Google’s earlier integration of data pulled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division to its search results. The goal of this is to make data more accessible to the public and is not as sophisticated compared to the advanced capabilities of Wolfram Alpha which allows the user to manipulate the data.
Amidst Google’s announcement, Bing now relies on Wolfram Alpha to answer some of its search queries. According to Readwriteweb.com:
“…the company [Microsoft] told us that the integration with Wolfram Alpha would only consist on exchanging data about nutrition and that was reflected in the first version of this post. In today’s blog post, however, Microsoft also announced that it will display math results from Alpha.”
These constant improvements of search engine capabilities are definitely not hurting Bing’s popularity as it shows signs of some sort of growth in the US. According to the latest Hitwise data, Bing’s market share in the US grew 7% last month and is now at 9.57%. And although it may take a long time until it catches up with Google in terms of market share, it will be interesting to see what the search engines have installed for the upcoming years.