Having discussed the suitability of “bing” as a name for a search engine someone mentioned that they had recently found a site called WolframAlpha. Now that’s what I call a name.

WolframAlpha is a “computational knowledge engine”. It is worth a look. I suspect that it has a long way to go before matching google though.  I typed in a simple question: “how many IPv6 addresses are there”  and it didn’t know where to look.

Also it is fairly flawed in other ways. I typed in my birth date, December 9th, 1961 (it likes it the American way round) and whilst it did come up with some really useful statistics such as the fact that I have now been on this planet for 17,338 days it could only come up with some actor called Joe Lando as having been born on that day.  Huh!

Interestingly, site founder Stephen Wolfram went to Eton with our CFO Jonathan Radford. 

As a footnote to the bing post I have already seen some favourable comments on it on Facebook.  Time will tell.