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Google's new toys

Google labs just released for your pleasure, some new toys to play with. The first is Google's Viewer, just type a few words to see a fully working preview of the web site. Another new idea: Google's Webquotes, View search results with quotes about them from other sites, and the last one is Google's Froogle, which aims to be the world's largest catalog.

17 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Viewer Requirements by rich951 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Javascript enabled

    PC and Mac: Internet Explorer 5 & above, Netscape 6 & above Unix: Mozilla

    Not much use to me until it works in Opera, I'm afraid! Although anything with tabbed browsing makes google searching a much happier place...

  2. froogle has helped me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    shave $30 off an order of glass petri dishses.

    So Go froogle!

  3. Google is God. by jericho4.0 · · Score: 3, Informative
    I know I'm not saying anything new to this thread, but I have to say it.

    Google defines 'best practice'. Google is the best thing on the web, bar none. Google, my friends, is God.

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  4. Re:I'm waiting for anonymity. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Try FreeNet. :)

  5. Re:Slashdot Japan by pseudogratixsignatus · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, it (/. Japan) is official. It started about a year and a half ago (May 28, 2001).

  6. Re:I'm waiting for anonymity. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Damn, I was just going to post that. Oh well, can't hurt to reiterate:

    TRY FREENET!

    And run a permanent node, if possible, but use it either way!

  7. Mozilla by n-baxley · · Score: 3, Informative

    At least this works on Mozilla unlike the Google toolbar provided by Google. (I know there's a third party version). I hope this is a sign of things to come.

  8. Re:Google contest ideas? by crapulent · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, I don't think this has anything to do with the Google programming contest. The winner and honorable mentions are listed on this page, and they have nothing really to do with the Google labs features announced recently. You can also read slashdot's coverage of the announcement as well as the announcement of the winners if you're interested.

  9. The Tao of Google by Derleth · · Score: 3, Informative
    Well, what if kerosune is a company name and I really did want to search on that and avoid kerosene? It's one thing to offer a different spelling, its another to up and change
    Semi-valid, but Google does say that the term returned no results and that it took the liberty of finding a close relative that matches something. Most people enjoy this, although I must admit it surprised me the first time I saw it. (More on this later.)
    Even when you don't get these kind of messages, the results are for the individual words, not the phrase.
    I'll have to verify this, but I know it was partially true a long time ago (in Google terms). Google has made its phrase-searching behavior a lot more intelligent than when I started using it (including stopwords without needing plus signs to force them, not seperating logical words for special processing, etc.), and you may well be complaining about old behavior.

    You want to know what my big beef with Google is? Lack of documentation. Lack of an easily-findable page that details what certain things do, and how the team has changed Google's behavior recently. Google also under-advertises its world-accessable beta features. I could have been using Google News, now a staple of my news-finding experience, long before I heard about it on a message board.

    Google is the master of clean, intelligent page design. It should be able to unobtrusively work in a link to a page describing advanced functionality and beta features right on its main page. It annoys and amazes me that Google doesn't more actively tout that it is the only group paving new roads in using the Internet.
    --
    How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
  10. Newsweek Article This Week by Runny · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google is featured in this week's Newsweek. You can find an online version of the Google article here.

  11. For those who haven't gone exploring.... by Frosty+Inc. · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google has so much more than just their search engine. For a list of other Google goodies, see Google Services & Tools.

    Also, there are several more things that Google Labs has already released here. I had fun with the Google Sets...it's a different way to search, but it brings up useful results that you might not have thought of.

    --


    Move along...nothing to see here.
  12. Re:that's pretty neat.. by mobets · · Score: 4, Informative

    It already does this. Click on the preferences link. The last option is exactly what you ask for. Make sure you are accepting cookies from google and click save.

    --

    It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
  13. Re:What about the other ones? by GeckoX · · Score: 2, Informative

    Stuff on google labs is NOT BETA. It's a freaking LAB, to play with ideas and try stuff.

    Google News and Froogle ARE beta, note that they are NOT on the google lab system anymore.

    You could have read this yourself at labs.google.com, kinda hard to miss. Gee, they even say explicitly that just because there is a feature in google labs, that in no way means that it will ever be an actual google feature.

    --
    No Comment.
  14. Re:What about the other ones? by e40 · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, Platypus was right. Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality at Google, said in a talk that things on labs.google.com may never see final release. It is a test ground, in all senses of the phrase (test the software, test how people like it, etc).

  15. Re:Prelim results by harmonica · · Score: 3, Informative

    I doubt it. It's long known that title and h1 elements are very important for Google (and recently, more and more of its competitors). Still, people often put nothing in those two HTML elements, or crap, or leave predefined values in there (like Untitled1). These people never seem to check if their own pages are in a search engine and what a query result on their pages looks like.

    A lot of people just don't know or care about good webauthoring.

  16. I've always enjoyed these Google toys by slagdogg · · Score: 3, Informative

    My favorite is Google Sets. I use it to look for new musical artists. For example, if I type in a few band names in a similar genre that I like it returns a list containing other similar bands. If there's a name there I don't recognize, I dig up their music and usually it's pretty good.

    --
    (Score:-1, Wrong)
  17. Another one by boatboy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Another fairly new one is https://answers.google.com/answers/main. People can use it to "name your own price" for more complex assisted searches. Looks like some of the researchers make some nice cash.