Wolfram Alpha...More than a Search Engine

This week the Webby Wednesday site is Wolfram Alpha www.wolframalpha.com. Wolfram Alpha describes itself as a "computational knowledge engine"...what does that mean? Well for starters, when you enter something into the search window on the site, the results that you receive will not be a list of websites. When you search for something, Wolfram Alpha gives you results about whatever you searched. For example, when searching for "Saginaw, TX" I received the following results...

This was just the beginning. Additionally, I received a local map, the local time, current weather, median home price, crime rates, and geographic properties. 

By entering a math problem in the search window, and I pretty much mean any math problem, Wolfram Alpha will yield the results of the equation in detail.

In the information boxes that you receive from a search, you have the ability to save the information as a picture or in plain text. To do this, hover over the page curl that appears when your cursor is in a box. Once you do this you will see the links to "Save as Playlist" or "Copyable Plain Text".

To get a better idea of what Wolfram Alpha is capable of, I highly recommend that you click to view "Examples by Topic". You will find this link from the homepage (under the search window). To see even more, once you have completed a search, to the right of the page reference the "New to Wolfram Alpha?" section.

If you find more super uses, particularly for classroom use please reply to the post and share =) 

Enjoy!