Google made it easier for people to shop for products on their mobile phone last week. The search engine integrated bar-code scanning into Android. The mobile phone feature, Google Product Search, enables people to look up information about a product's ratings, reviews and price on the Web. Consumers simply download an app to the phone and scan the bar code with the handset's camera.
The bar-code app is one of several features Google introduced last week in a race to compete for news with a new search engine scheduled to officially launch Monday, according to some industry insiders. WolframAlpha, named after creator Stephen Wolfram, a computer scientist who invented the "computational knowledge engine."
The WolframAlpha search engine made its debut Friday and continued testing through the weekend. The engine provides a new way to discover information. Unlike Google, the search engine pull stats from trillions of pieces of information sourced from thousands of Web sites, libraries and academic journals.
A source list appears at the bottom of the search queries. Five centers house about 10,000 CPUs that will handle thousands of queries per second.
