If you’re keeping a close eye on the U.S. economy—and who isn’t, these days?—you probably noticed yesterday’s news that retail sales increased in August for the second month in a row. But you may not have noticed that Wolfram|Alpha is now picking up these Department of Commerce reports as soon as they are released, and allows you to explore and compute U.S. retail sales data so you can better understand these trends.

Try simply asking Wolfram|Alpha about “U.S. retail sales” and you’ll see the latest monthly figure, along with automatic computations of that number as a per capita value and as a fraction of total U.S. GDP, as well as the annual growth rate for overall retail sales. To filter out the seasonal variation in many sales categories, you can also ask for “seasonally adjusted retail sales“—which more clearly shows the retail sector’s dramatic plunge in late 2008.

You can also explore trends in individual retail categories (click “More” in the “Retail sales categories” pod for a detailed list), such as clothing stores or electronic shopping and mail order houses.

Or you can mash up this retail sales data with other economic data in Wolfram|Alpha. Try comparing retail sales at building-supply dealers with housing starts, for example, or retail sales at jewelry stores compared with civilian unemployment. (Note that advance figures for August aren’t available for all individual retail categories, so Wolfram|Alpha will default to the latest available values.) More »

Wolfram|Alpha launched with an extensive database of United States economic data, derived from the Federal Reserve Bank’s FRED database. Over the past year, we’ve continued to improve our handling of this data in a variety of ways—teaching Wolfram|Alpha to return more related statistics along with any specific result, improving our linguistic abilities so we can answer more complex questions, and increasing the frequency with which we update this data. Wolfram|Alpha is now refreshing its collection of FRED-derived data on a daily basis, so you can always access the latest available data on the national economy.

We’ve also begun to expand our coverage of economic data for smaller geographic areas in the United States, starting with state-level statistics. This means Wolfram|Alpha users can now query for the latest available information on a variety of economic topics, including gross state product, unemployment, health insurance coverage, and housing-related data.

As always, one of the strengths of Wolfram|Alpha is that it allows you to compare and analyze different pieces of data—and with this data set, you can quickly uncover strong correlations between various economic properties. It’s easy to see that the house price index tends to move together with employment and state tax collections. You can also use Wolfram|Alpha to run simple calculations of productivity in U.S. states, or to find out a given state’s share of the national economy or workforce.

To make it even easier to explore this data, you can also use the new Wolfram|Alpha Widget Builder to create simple tools for analyzing and comparing the economic properties of states. To get you started, here’s a small selection of widgets focused on US state economies—ranging from the serious to the slightly silly. Try them out:

Feel free to customize and share these on Twitter or Facebook, in your blog, or anywhere else—and let us know in the comments if you create any useful new widgets of your own.

Since Wolfram|Alpha‘s launch in May 2009, one of its most talked-about features has been its ability to compute specific answers to questions about math, chemistry, economics, demographics, and much more. But as its knowledge base continues to grow, it’s also able to highlight interesting and useful connections between data sets, and to reveal information that you might not think to ask for on your own.

One of the coolest examples of this is our recently enhanced relocation calculator. For several months, we’ve been able to answer simple questions about the relative cost of living in various United States cities and metropolitan areas. If you told Wolfram|Alpha that you were relocating from Seattle to Miami with a salary of $35000, you’d get a comparison of the relative cost of groceries, housing, and other expenses in each city, plus an estimate of the salary required to maintain a comparable standard of living in your destination city. On its own, this is a useful little calculator—but it’s also something that dozens of other websites could do.

But because Wolfram|Alpha knows tons of other details about any given city, our relocation calculator can now do things that no other site can. In addition to salary and cost-of-living comparisons, you now get comparisons of each city’s population, median home sale prices, unemployment rates, crime rates, sales taxes, traffic congestion, and climate—a useful sampling of current and historical comparative data for anyone contemplating a move.

We’ll highlight similar enhancements as they are released. And as always, we welcome your suggestions for new data, or new ways of looking at existing data, in any domain covered by Wolfram|Alpha.

When we launched Wolfram|Alpha in May 2009, it already contained trillions of pieces of information—the result of nearly five years of sustained data-gathering, on top of more than two decades of formula and algorithm development in Mathematica. Since then, we’ve successfully released a new build of Wolfram|Alpha’s codebase each week, incorporating not only hundreds of minor behind-the-scenes enhancements and bug fixes, but also a steady stream of major new features and datasets.

We’ve highlighted some of these new additions in this blog, but many more have entered the system with little fanfare. As we near the end of 2009, we wanted to look back at seven months of new Wolfram|Alpha features and functionality.

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