Happy birthday, dear Wolfram|Alphaaaaaaa…. happy birthday to youuuu….. Search engine Wolfram|Alpha put up an interesting blog post Tuesday about its first anniversary and the way it has changed over the last year. The search engine also announced a few changes.

The home page is a bit different, pretty but still simple. If you’ve never quite “gotten” W|A, check out the examples by topic, so you can get an idea of what Wolfram|Alpha can do. If you really want to get under the hood, check out the still-incomplete entity index, which shows you very specific examples of what W|A covers in different categories. (This is still under development but it’s fascinating and I can’t wait to see how it fills out.) The home page also has settings now, too, though it’s just for background settings (the blue one is nice) and whether W|A shows hints or not. Looks like it relies on cookies to keep these settings.

There’s also some new content; the site now offers street maps; searching for something like Sydney Opera House shows, in addition to information about the structure itself, a street map to where the structure is located. There’s also several ways to search for diseases — pulling up that URL will let you calculate disease risk, look at the incidence of disease in populations, get information on specific diseases, and more. I did find that I had to play with my searches a bit to get some of these results. And of course I knew a long time ago that the phrase random disease works.

W|A also announced that when the search engine doesn’t know the answer to a question, it’ll will try to find the “nearest” query to interpret. It doesn’t work all the time, but W|A is working on making this better. I’ll need it, because I’m still not great at figuring out Wolfram|Alpha’s syntax sometimes, though I find myself using it more and more.

In fact, I’m using it so much that I find myself actually looking for a couple of features, though neither one of them is probably what W|A is made for. First of all is an expansion of random words. You can search W|A for random word and get a word with definitions, synonyms, etc. But though the definitions include the parts of speech, you can’t search for, say, random noun. I wish you could; it would be a handy tool for Mad Libs or generating random queries for Flickr. You also can’t stack random queries, either, which is a shame. Wouldn’t it be a great creativity tool for writers if you could run the query random first name, random surname, random occupation, random city and get all the answers on one page?

Happy birthday, Wolfram|Alpha. You’re not getting as much attention as you probably deserve, but it hasn’t stopped you from evolving in new and useful ways. Keep it up!