While Wolfram Alpha, the much disputed “computational knowledge engine”, might not be a tremendously big advancement in the field of Artificial Intelligence, it can be pretty useful on a practical level. In my case, I found it to be particularly useful in calculating calories. While there are no lack of sites that can calculate calories for you, I find Wolfram Alpha to be particularly quick, accurate and extensively helpful.
For example, if you type in 350g cantaloupe, you will get not only the calories (119), but also other detailed nutritional values, as shown in the image below:
Nutritional values for 350g of cantaloupe
What’s more interesting is that Wolfram Alpha tends to be quite forgiving of typos and is “smart” enough to perform relatively useful nutritional calculations for you.
For instance, you could search for 200g milk + 5 Oreos and you would get all the nutritional values for a somewhat unhealthy but delicious snack. Of course there are several types of milk, and the interface takes this into account by allowing you to pick from a wide selection by clicking on “More”, which is located just below the input box.
Want to know what foods are the richest in Iron? Just search richest foods iron and you’ll get the nice table below.
A list of foods that contain the most Iron
If you are using Firefox, you can speed up the process even further by creating a keyword for the search box. Right click in the search box at WolframAlpha.com, and select “Add a Keyword for this Search…”. In the popup that appears, define a keyword that will be used as a shortcut for Wolfram Alpha, as shown below:
Creating a Keyword for Wolfram Alpha's search
Click “Save” and from now on you will be able to type within your address bar, searches like wa 400g watermelon. I personally use this handy function on a daily basis.
