Wolfram Alpha

"One new and noteworthy upgrade is the inclusion of search results from Wolfram Alpha, an oddball, "computational knowledge" search tool that's probably too geeky for the average user. When integrated with a mainstream query engine, however, Wolfram Alpha algorithms prove their mettle by returning actionable data rather than just a page of links. Microsoft provides a few examples on its Bing blog. Search for "bmi," for instance, and Bing displays Wolfram Alpha's body mass index calculator at the top of the results page." - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

Bing does in fact sound like its has a catchy ring to it. May be serious contender for the search engine throne. - TrafficBug

The integration of Wolfram Alpha results into Bing is indeed a decent move by Microsoft, question is if it's exclusive or whether Google can just license the same thing from WA. If Microsoft were smart, they would have already bought WA to have its results EXCLUSIVE in Bing. Same applies to Twitter results btw. I both Google and Bing license access to Twitter, it's not a differentiator. Buying Twitter could have solved that for them. - Alex Schleber

I'll be at the Wolfram and Microsoft presentations tomorrow :) - Judah Richardson

"Wolfram|Alpha offers a collection of money and finance tools ideal for finance professionals and personal finance matters. This data flows into Wolfram|Alpha in real time, providing traders with computation results in charts and graphs. In this post, we’ll look at a variety of ways Wolfram|Alpha can compute and present stock data." - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

Hopefully this means that we'll see an iPhone app soon. - Akiva Moskovitz from Bookmarklet

"Access to the API is not free. The cost to use it depends on volume and intended use. The smallest developer plan, which provides 1,000 API lookups, is a one-time $60 plus $0.08 per additional request. Monthly plans range from $2,000 for 25,000 requests up to $220,000 for 10 million requests." http://news.cnet.com/8301-19... - François Dongier

"Join us on Wednesday, October 21, 2009, at noon CDT, for the start of Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day, a groundbreaking marathon live interactive web event that brings together students, parents, and educators from across the United States to solve their toughest assignments and explore the power of using Wolfram|Alpha for school, college, and beyond." - Judah Richardson from Bookmarklet

Reposting to W|A group I just found. - Andrew Lang

"Microsoft's Bing search engine is getting a little help from a very smart friend. Wolfram Alpha and Bing have reached a licensing deal that allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates, according to a source familiar with the deal." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"That, at least, is what Stephen Wolfram, founder of computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha, has tried to convince us in a lengthy post over at the official blog. Personally, I’ve encountered a serious usability problem with Wolfram Alpha that pretty much stopped me from using it: it’s very broad in scope, but on the other hand it doesn’t always work perfectly. After a while, I’ve moved back to simple, specific tools (found via Google) created for the purpose of various calculations. An example: in a recent article I mentioned calculating your daily calorie intake with Wolfram Alpha. A commenter pointed out that you cannot actually do that; you can do various other similar calculations, but not that one – and calculating daily calorie intake is precisely what most users need. Now, without giving specific examples, Stephen Wolfram says that Wolfram Alpha has grown tremendously. Here are some numbers: 2 million lines of Mathematica code were added, meaning the engine has grown by... more... - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

"In Wolfram|Alpha you can retrieve data for a chemical element in a number of ways, such as by name, symbol, atomic number, or a specific class, such as radioactive elements." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Wolfram|Alpha contains a wealth of chemistry data, and provides you rapid computations that ensure accuracy and save time. Wolfram|Alpha is also an incredible learning tool, especially for new chemistry students looking for ways to learn, understand, compare, and test their knowledge of chemistry basics. Many of the topic areas found on an introductory or advanced course syllabus can be explored in Wolfram|Alpha." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Does this summer seem hotter than last year’s? Are you debating between a trip to Miami or Florance in the springtime? Or perhaps heading to Tokyo in November, and wondering how to pack? Wolfram|Alpha has a number of helpful tools to answer your weather questions, by retrieving current conditions, forecasts, and historical data from weather stations located all over the world. For example, simply enter “weather” into the computation bar, and Wolfram|Alpha’s geoIP capabilities identify your approximate location and produce the latest records from your nearest weather station. The “Latest recorded weather” pod may feature information like the current temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and conditions, such as clear, thunderstorms, or fog. Go ahead and click here to give it a try for your area." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

Google was started in the late 1990s, and incorporated in 1998. Work on facebook started in 2003 or so, and incorporated in 2004. - DGentry

'A trip to the doctor’s office can sometimes leave patients with more questions than answers, specifically if their doctor has requested they undergo medical tests. Wolfram|Alpha is a helpful reference for understanding what the tests measure and how to interpret the results. Wolfram|Alpha allows you to query information on a specific medical test or a panel of tests, compare tests and results for patients with specific characteristics, compute your estimated risk for heart disease, and find the diagnosis corresponding to an ICD-9 code. Wolfram|Alpha can take into account specific patient characteristics like gender, age, smoker, non-smoker, pregnant, diabetic, obese, and underweight. Wolfram|Alpha can give you a snapshot of available data that might help you understand how your results compare to others’. (Wolfram|Alpha does not give any advice, medical or otherwise.)' - Akiva Moskovitz from Bookmarklet

This is pretty interesting. I'm going to have to play around with it. I do have a few quibbles with their example, since a CBC without a differential still includes a white blood count. And it's pretty cool that they stratify the reference ranges by age, but 0-7 years old may be a little too broad. - Victor Ganata

The 10-year coronary artery disease risk calculator is pretty cool, too. - Victor Ganata

"Wolfram|Alpha is a great resource for writers. It has an enormous words and linguistics database that writers can use for such things as word definitions, origins, synonyms, hyphenation, and Soundex lookups." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

Great reminder and true! - Charlie Anzman

Another great use for WolframAlpha (after the crossword puzzles #lifehack): As a linguistics database for writers - Alex Schleber

"My youngest son often asks whether a particular object in the sky is a planet or a star. If it’s a planet, of course, he wants to know which planet. Some of them I can pick out. Venus isn’t usually rocket science (no pun intended). Mercury can be a little tougher. Fortunately, I stumbled across a video blog from Wolfram Alpha yesterday that describes their efforts specifically in the field of astronomy." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

"At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha's Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it's hard to grok, most people have categorized Wolfram|Alpha as a new type of search engine. The site got a lot of press when it launched in May, as many pundits saw it as a challenger to Google. However in our own extensive tests of the product before launch, we concluded that it isn't a "Google Killer" and that it has more in common with Wikipedia." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

"In recent blog entries we have been highlighting ways Wolfram|Alpha can compute complex data to be helpful in our everyday lives. Yesterday, we discussed how Wolfram|Alpha can help us track all the good (and not so good) nutrients we put in our bodies. Some indications of how well we may, or may not, be doing in that area are measurements of the human body. Wolfram|Alpha has some easy and fun tools to create general or personalized reports for adults and kids alike. As a reminder, all Wolfram|Alpha medical results are based on statistical data, and are not medical advice." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

searched today for stats on human heartbeat... Walpha came up empty-handed. Supposedly there is a fixed number of beats per lifetime across mammals, ~2 billion. Any good references? - Adriano

"Wolfram|Alpha has the powerful ability to compute complex data into insightful outputs that can be helpful tools in our everyday lives. One area where this is most evident is the Wolfram|Alpha collection of food and nutrition information. Users have marveled over how quick and easy it is to analyze nutrition information for their favorite homemade recipes, and compare nutritional values of everything from dietary staples to those occasional indulgences." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

Interesting #lifehack using Wolfram Alpha: Nutrition calculations.. "WA Blog : Something to Chew On" - Alex Schleber

To make it just a touch ‘cooler’, an iPhone formatted version of the engine is now located at www.wolframalpha.com/iphone. Punch this into Safari on your iPhone to give it a whirl… I think you’ll really enjoy it! - zsafwan  from Bookmarklet

"One of the most popular Wolfram|Alpha features is the name directory. Whether you’re researching your own name or brainstorming baby names, the Wolfram|Alpha given name directory is a fun tool you can use to compare name popularity and statistics." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

"Say what you will about Wolfram Alpha, the creators are hard at work trying to drum up interest in the site. On Tuesday, the WA crew launched a number of updates to its service, some of which I tested. Now the team's Thursday blog points you to the many "cool tools" you can use to access the site--buttons, widgets, gadgets, and more. You can grab them from the Wolfram Alpha download page, where you'll find the tools organized by operating system and browser. I took them all for a spin to see how they fared." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

Hehe. - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

Nice! - Michael McKean

lol! - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

"Here’s another thing that’ll make Wolfram Alpha more fun than Google: updates. When some aspect of Google’s search gets updated, we don’t necessarily notice it, and it’s not usually easy to make an ordered list of the exact updates that happened. However, Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine; it only handles the data that was fed to it, and thus its data set (and the algorithms for its manipulation) will get updated every once in a while." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

"In the past month, we’ve seen some new search engine launches. Two in particular were able to generate a hype cycle of early positive reviews and excitement: Bing and Wolfram Alpha. One was launched by Microsoft, and the other by a startup. It is inherently not a fair comparison because Microsoft has so much more money to spend on marketing ($80 to $100 million is earmarked for Bing)> But most of the buzz so far has been generated by the respective launches with all of the blog and news coverage that entails." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

"So what’s been going on with Wolfram since it’s high profile launch? As of May 23rd, when Dr. Wolfram answered Mashable’s questions, more than 100 million queries had already been conducted. Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha’s somewhat infamous albeit entertaining easter eggs seem to keep popping up and gaining interest from users." - Kol Tregaskes from Bookmarklet

"In any event, on Thursday, you’ll have your own opportunity to ask questions, as Dr. Wolfram will be responding to both common questions and issues that have already been sent in, as well as live questions asked via the Justin.tv chat." - Kol Tregaskes