Slashdot Mirror
Google Experiments
gafferted writes "The boffins at google have been experimenting with new toys, such as Keyboard Shortcuts and glossary, but most fun is Google Sets. Try "green, purple, red" to get a set of 40 different colours. Try a set that contains both Richard Stallman and Bill Gates, see what google associates with Slashdot or ask for a set of rude words."
It looks like the only machine that's melted is the lab1.google.com one. I'm just dreading what the Slashdot effect is going to do to that poor Voice Search phoneline!
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
It seems that in addition to labs1
there is also labs.google.com
labs2.google.com
labs3.google.com
labs front page works(right now) the rest don't, and links off of labs, try to go to labs1 and crash and burn...
I spent a couple hours playing with google labs last night and one of the most impressiev things (to me) was how I put in 3 bands:
Nirvana
Alice in Chains
Pearl Jam
and received one of the most accurate lists of other grunge and hard rock/heavy bands back that I've seen. To be able to build such a list on something as subjective as music is very impressive, and shows you just how good the quality of google's algorithms are.
$45 per U Colocation Special
Also try the beta for Google's Catalog Search
http://www.kubuntu.org/
5. What happened to that cool thing I was playing around with last week?
The prototypes on Google Labs are meant to be low maintenance experiments. If one disappears it may be because no one was interested enough to use it, it wasn't stable enough for users to try it out, or it was so wildly successful that heavy usage brought the server to its knees. While that particular application may not reappear, there should be something equally interesting to replace it shortly.
So after today's /.ing, are they going to replace the entire lab site?
I discovered the voice search yesterday (and submitted it but was rejected... but that's not the point). It was pretty fun - since it's slashdotted, though, I'll mention that it worked for me: when I said "The Simpsons," it gave results for "The Simpsons" and "The Sims," which is understandable. Somebody else did a search for "ISDN" and got results for "ISDN" as well as "ISBN." The last search was for "Corvette," which gave a lot of results that contained "Court of" in the title, but the sidebar on the right (the paid sponsors) had links to Corvette sites.
So, bookmark that site and someday in the future, when it is not slashdotted, try the voice search! It's not a toll-free number, but the coolness factor is well worth it. I don't know where it would be really useful (you still need a web browser to view the results), except in the case where you know how to pronounce a word but not how to spell it.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
In the spirit of automated classification and machine learning, I
tried searching for a set containing "boosting", "SVM" and "bagging"
(without "bagging", nothing new is found; another problem).
Results: "SVM", "Bagging", "Boosting", "stacking" and "Other methods".
Clicking on either of the 2 new links ("stacking" or "Other methods")
takes me to the normal Google search on the term. This is of course
not useful -- I need the terms in the machine learning context, which I
cannot get.
Especially in the case of "Other methods", it would be nice to be able
to get to the page Google had in mind...
2 dashes and a space, or just 2 dashes?
For example, try entering "Frank Welker", "Don Messick", and "Maurice LaMarche" (all cartoon voice actors). Under "small set", you get back nothing but a failure page that implies you need to change the terms to get results. The failure page doesn't even have the "expand your search" link that successful small set searches have. But if you use "large set", you get back 3 additional items (well under the 15 item set limit of a small set).