Wolfram Alpha will be launching an intriguing new professional version this week that provides some compelling features for people looking to use the power of Wolfram Alpha custom data and images.

Wolfram Alpha, you may recall, is the data-driven search engine that launched in 2009. Since then, it has made some great strides with perhaps its biggest coup being that it is the underlying database that powers the Siri voice search on the iPhone 4S.

When it launched in 2009, I wrote a piece called "Wolfram Alpha Doesn't Impress Me." The problem was the answers you got depended very much on whether the engine understood your query, and if it was seeded with data to give a reasonable answer to that query. When I tried it today, I found the same problems I had back then. It didn't understand my queries (or I didn't understand how to enter a reasonable one).

Yet when Wolfram Alpha works well, it gives you some very interesting data.

And starting this week, you can plug in your own data or even drag in images (of a chart for example) and let Wolfram Alpha find interesting data points for you, ones you might not have found on your own. In an example described in a New York Times article, if you drag and dropped a table of the gross domestic product figures for France for 1961 to 2010 into Wolfram Alpha, it generated a color-coded bar chart, which you could download in different document formats. 

As with the previous version, the NYT article noted it didn't always understand the data, but when it works well, it can give you some interesting results and you can save those results in a variety of formats.

The service will cost $4.99 a month, $2.99 for students.

For more information:
- see this Search Engine Land article explaining the features of Wolfram Alpha Pro
- see this Verge article with an in-depth explanation and video walk-through of Wolfram Alpha Pro

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