Wolfram Alpha API (Google Cache)

Also, I got one of the TC invites to try W|A a couple hours before the main launch. It is much less useful than you'd expect. No data on: crime rates, test scores, alcohol content (though it does tell you the LD50 of alcohol), etc.

Fun stuff: side-by-side comparisons. Compare Apple and IBM, or Harvard and University of Phoenix.

Also, for some of the stocks it shows a "simulated log-normal random walks based on historical parameters" -- a couple charts of ways the stock could theoretically perform in the future. Not too useful, but fun.

I saw an argument on HN recently where people made these statements:

1. The UK is a much more violent society than the US, statistically.

2. There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK.

3. Murder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US.

No-one provided sources; people asked for them later. Suppose HN ran an automated fact-checker over every sentence ever posted, searching for statements of the form: "[country] is (much|a lot)? more [quality] than [country]" - or a more sophisticated regex that captures more applicable cases.

And then, for the sentences that it understands, it checks the claim. Maybe it highlights incorrect statements in red, or just adds footnotes. This might make online debates more rigorous. Not only would a few statements be fact-checked, but the knowledge that a fact-checking program will look at your comment might incentivize people to be more careful with facts.

Newspapers and other media would find automated fact-checkers useful too.

Taking a longer view (like decades), with good speech-to-text technology, it could fact-check TV broadcasts in real-time. This should improve the debate quality not just of obscure internet forums, but also nationally-broadcast TV. Then, maybe, we'd see an improvement in the accuracy of all political debate, which should improve democracy.

Just because they won't be able to pronounce it like an old English man doesn't make the service any less useful or powerful. And I don't buy Yahoo's name is the reason for its success.