If you love geeky hidden gems, you’re probably already a fan of Wolfram Alpha. As you may know, Wolfram Alpha is not your traditional search engine; it actually computes data to give you the answer you’re looking for.
As it can do so many things, help is often welcome to find out about new features. Well, here is one you may want to try: you can now search for “flights overhead” to find out more about that plane above you, Wolfram Alpha’s blog reports.
Using your geoIP location, the answer-engine gives you a list of flights nearby, and you can see a detailed snapshot of each of them by clicking on its name. You can also filter data by airline, or on the contrary group it to see all flights from a particular airport on a specific day. There’s one caveat however: as the data comes from the FAA, it only works for flights with at least one endpoint in the US.
Of course, flight tracking isn’t new and a few apps like Flight Track App offer similar features, but what’s nice with this feature is that you can access it from the web and don’t need to know the exact details of the flight you’re looking for.
On a higher level, it’s also fascinating to see Wolfram Alpha becoming more and more robust. The visualization is also pretty cool.
You can try it now if you live anywhere near a US air lane – if you don’t, here’s what the results look like:
What’s your favorite Wolfram Alpha feature? Let us know in the comments.
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