Bing-ing nutrition data and recipes to one search
You likely have heard of Bing through their heavy advertising campaign. If not, Bing is a search engine; Microsoft’s answer to Google’s dominance in search. Though right now there are not many reasons to switch from Google if you are used to it, Bing is adding some interesting features that may be of use to some health enthusiasts.
First, if you regularly read the blog you have seen some of the nutrition related calculations WolframAlpha can do. Recently Bing partnered with WA and added the ability to do WA queries through Bing. So searching for particular health related data (or any subjects WA can do) on Bing will show an answer calculated by WA. Though some of the questions need to be phrased very specifically to get a calculation, this will only get better as WA improves.
Second, Bing now shows recipes when searching for foods from websites such as epicurious.com, MyRecipes.com, and more into one list. Bing also compares recipe calorie and fat content between recipes, and clicking on each shows Ingredients, Directions, and more detailed Nutritional Information. Even better, on the left hand side there are a number of filtering options to narrow your search to find specific recipes. You can filter by rating, cuisine, convenience, occasion, main ingredient, course, and cooking method. See the video below.
Both features give Bing an edge on Google in the race to a semantic web. As search engines improve in their ability to identify data, they become more useful as information sources.
Trick or Tweet?
A couple of updates heading into the weekend.
Wolframalpha posted another nutrition (and Halloween) related blog entry about using the engine to compare and/or total brand name candy nutritional information. The data they use is from the latest USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. A neat trick to quickly make comparisons without manually finding the data.
Twitter released its own official Lists feature to all users this week, enabling anyone to create a list of recommended members to share or keep private. It is also useful to separate those you follow into groups to track by topic. It should make it much easier to find people and tweets of interest to follow. There are a number already created for food and health.
Happy Halloween!
WolframAlpha Health & Fitness community forum
Have you visited WolframAlpha yet? It is the most powerful search engine launched this year, but this is no Google. Instead, WA offers a powerful computation engine that can make nutritional comparisons and quickly extract reliable data.
A couple of months ago I wrote on nutrition related searches that are made possible with the engine.
Prior to and since, WA has published a number of blog posts showing different ways of using it for nutrition searches.
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/06/16/something-to-chew-on/
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/07/02/hot-dog-days-of-summer/
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/07/15/how-many-calories-does-my-body-need/
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/07/27/wolframalpha-can-help-you-make-smart-food-choices/
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/08/07/calculating-your-daily-food-intake-with-wolframalpha/
Earlier this week, WA updated their Community page, segmenting health related topics into a Health & Fitness forum. If you have previously undiscovered ways of using WA for health computations, it offers a place to share them. WA staff also regularly visit to take suggestions for improvements as well.
As WA’s potential progresses, I will continue updating when relevant nutrition tools are added and when helpful tips are posted to the forum.
Check out examples in other subjects they highlight in their blog, and in the examples database.
Please comment if you find WA useful in practice or educational settings.
WolframAlpha for Nutrition Professionals
WolframAlpha, a powerful search engine that was just launched in May this year, has a few useful tricks that deal with nutrition data.
For example, you can type in any food, and the amount, and WA will give you the nutrition data in a label form along with more information than you’ll probably ever need. It also will recognize brands, so for example, entering “2 mcdonalds double cheeseburgers” yields the calculated information: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+mcdonalds+double+cheeseburger
WA can also add the data from multiple food items, so if you have an interesting meal of corn flakes, orange juice, a peach, and a beer, the resulting nutrition facts are like so: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+1+bowl+of+corn+flakes+%2B+a+glass+of+OJ+%2B+1+peach+%2B+1+beer
You can see that WA gives options to choose from specific brands (or alternate sizes) if they are not specified, and you can also separate the facts of each item.
Specific nutrients can be easily calculated, for example if I wanted to know the vitamin C content of 5 oranges, I enter “vitamin C in 5 oranges” and it gives the answer: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=vitamin+C+in+5+oranges
Other specific examples are listed here: http://www07.wolframalpha.com/examples/FoodAndNutrition.html
Other relevant data examples for body composition, exercise, and more (lots of relevant possibilities for MNT) can be found here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/HealthAndMedicine.html
Please comment if you find other uses.
Sources of the data are listed at the bottom.
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Join the Nutrition 2.0 FriendFeed room to further discuss these topics: http://friendfeed.com/nutrition20 -
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Join the Nutrition 2.0 FriendFeed room to further discuss these topics: http://friendfeed.com/nutrition20 -