Marketing Pilgrim

If a tree falls in the woods, but nobody cares about the tree, does it still deserve a blog post?

Well if that tree is WolframAlpha, and the noise heard is the sound of new updates, then the answer is yes. Hey, just because I don’t happen to find value in the (not a) search engine, that doesn’t mean that you’re not fascinated by it. Right?

Today we learn that:

Altogether, there have been 1850 code commits, and 591 code files have been changed. About 1.1 million data values have also been touched in some way in this update.

The full list of updates includes:

• Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions
• More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. “US military vs. UK”)
• Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. “germany gdp vs population”)
• More complete handling of government positions (e.g. “chancellor”, etc.)
• Updates to country borders for India, China, Slovenia, Croatia, and others
• Updates to naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions
• Additional subcountry regions (e.g. “Wales”); many more to come
• Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. “Iran time”)
• City-by-city handling of U.S. states with multiple timezones
• Updates to certain European currencies (e.g. for “Cyprus” and “Slovakia”)
• Some additional historical events; many more to come
• Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. “2 or 3 aces”)
• Additional output for partitions of integers (e.g. “partitions of 47″)
• Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. “ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2″)
• Additional support for Mathematica 3D graphics syntax
• Additional support for stock prices with explicit dates
• Support for planet-to-planet distances and “nearest planet”, etc.
• Extra information when comparing incompatible units (e.g. “ergs vs. newtons”)
• Improved linguistic handling for many foods (e.g. “love apple”)
• More mountains added, especially in Australia
• Support for many less-common given names (e.g. “zebulon”)
• More “self-aware” questions answered (e.g. “how old are you”)
• More consistent handling of sidebar links to Wikipedia, etc.

I don’t know about you, but I am practically drooling at the thoughts of “More mountains added, especially in Australia!”

Aside: If only we had that much transparency from Google, eh?