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Friday, April 01, 2011

Bing versus Google

Earlier today I needed to convert 6-inches to that distance in the units of meters. Search engines are known to perform computations. Here's what Bing provided:

which is terribly wrong. A meter is about 3-feet, so 6-inches, at 1/2-feet is about 1/6-meter or 0.17-meters.

I tried Google:

and got the right answer.

So, what's up with Bing?

Update: If I type in Bing: "6 inches to meters" I do get the right answer. So, what's the difference between "6-inches to meters" and "6 inches to meters" other than the dash after the 6? And, this is cute, for Google, the dash in the search terms, doesn't even return a wrong answer; rather I get no conversion.

Seems weird to me, but maybe I'm missing something.




1 comment:

Andy Ilachinski said...

What you are missing is that you should be using WolframAlpha instead for that ;-)

On the other hand, I've read that Bing is *using* WolframAlpha to provide better search-lookup "answers". If so, there must be some kind of comm problems ;-)