Wolfram Alpha rolls out first major updates

Wolfram Alpha, the service that’s less of a Google-like search engine and more of a “computational knowledge engine” of information on the Internet, announced major updates on Tuesday and said it plans to offer more in the future.

Below are the first major updates to Wolfram Alpha in its entirety:

* 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.