Two new search engines came to light in the last couple of weeks. Bing, the new Microsoft entry, has not officially debuted but I had a chance to play a little with Wolfram Alpha and it provides a very different user experience than Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask or other mainstream engines. Wolfram Alpha draws on mathematical calculations and analysis so it’s great for comparing stock performance, solving equations, computing distances or time – all those quant skills that shut down the minute I left business school. It is really more of a computational resource itself than a pathway to web based resources. It’s an interesting and useful tool for specific applications and needs but I don’t know that I would even call it a search engine.

So far, Bing is still in “coming soon” mode. MSN is putting significant resources into the launch and promotion. Early word and the site video outline some very innovative features for integrated and refined searching plus some cool shopping functionality like price predictors and cashback. We’ll be watching this one closely, especially to determine how currently running MSN campaigns will be impacted by the surge of the curious when it does actually launch.