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.

Comments

Prelim results

[gowen]

I've been playing with these since they appeared on The Register a few days ago. I can't say I'm massively impressed. The slideshow is lovely eye candy, but, sadly, the top bit of each web page it shows is all too often just a banner ad and a navbar, which isn't always a lot of use. Froogle is US-centric, and no good for me, but it is the best name I've seen in a long time.

Re:Prelim results

[Ed Avis]

Heh, perhaps the Google slideshow will encourage sites to put useful information at the top of pages rather than junk.

Re:Prelim results

[aridhol]

I'd love to see DoubleClick's database after this has been running for a while.

Let's try this one again in English

[Anonymous Coward]

Google labs just released some new toys for your pleasure. 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. The last one is Google's Froogle, which aims to be the world's largest catalog.

Now compare that to what actually got posted above.

Google contest ideas?

[Christopher Doopov]

Are these new features based on ideas from the Google contest, which took place some time ago? If so, what are the other ideas, which are not yet implemented, but which may be used in the future?

Re:Google contest ideas?

[WatertonMan]

None of them sound like entries in the Google contest. The only entry from the contest that sounded like it had relevance to business was the one that tied geographic maps to web searches. I was actually surprised they didn't implement that one.

There are a few ideas that I'd like to see Google ad, but these are interesting, if mostly proof of concepts. Froogle in particular is a good idea but doesn't allow price comparisons like MySimon does. Were they to add that it would be considerably more useful. Further it oddly seems to leave out a lot of stores, I noticed.

The web annotation tool is also a good idea. But I have a feeling that it needs to be better integrated with the google bar. (BTW - when is a Mac version coming?) Annotation has been discussed for quite a while. I have a wrox book at home on XML Metadata that discusses a lot of this. Unfortunately in practice it has never been applied to the general web.

There are lots of features of the original hypertext research in the 60's that are yet to be applied to the web. Google utilizes some concepts for its ranking, such as "links to" information. Wouldn't it be great to have a Google bar monitoriing your pages and make suggestings for helpful pages that link to the page you are on? There are many ideas like that which would improve ones browsing experience.

There are a few privacy concerns, but I'm exciting that Google offers these tests. The news site has become my favorite site on the web. It tends to get better stories than the other meta-news site I used to visit: DrudgeReport.com

Re:Google contest ideas?

[mhesseltine]

About the mapping of searches to geographic data. There was a recent NYT article that went inside Google Labs, and in the lab, they have just that sort of thing. There's a 3-d world representation, and searches through an IP are mapped to the location of that IP. Search volume creates a color-changing peak that rises from the location. Larger volume creates a higher peak. It ends up looking like certain major cities are on fire.

I'd dredge up the /. article on it, but the /. search sucks.

Froogle is great

[jimius]

I was looking for a certain not so easy to come by CD and it actually found a lot of hits including stores with low prices.

Google seems to be innovative on a lot of fronts creating things that are truly helpfull without flashy banners and pop-up ads.

Google knows, the trick is in it's simplictiy for the user.

Other interesting articles

[nich37ways]

Ars technica also has review up of froogle along with a funny review of google's plan for world domination

--

nich

What about the other ones?

[John_Renne]

Off course all these playground-features are nice but when will anything become standard. Other beta-stuff like Google Glossary and Google Sets looked very nice but both are still in beta. Google will remain my favourite search-engine but they in my opinion they could be a bit faster in offering new services.

Re:What about the other ones?

[Galvatron]

No, I think beta testing means exactly what it implies, the software is not release quality yet. At the moment, they probably don't feel like the sorting algorithm they use is "fair," and so they're still finetuning it. Clearly, this can be a lengthy process, which is why they let people use it while they're still working on it. All they're saying by "beta" is that it's not good enough to stake their reputation on, so if you use it, be aware that they think it's not up to the same standard as the rest of their work yet.

The universal knowledge repository

[katalyst]

Google has access to so much information. A study of human behavior and interests can be made by just parking yourself at the Google HQ, where apparantly, they have lotsa screens which keep displaying the kinda stuff people are looking for. Beats trainspotting ;)
Another google toy : it's fun to use. The Google Mirror. It's a blast, you actually gotta enter your query the other way around, coz it's a MIRROR silly !!

The mandatory pr0n reference

[stud9920]

Yay ! Now I can keep both hands free while browsing pr0n !

Re:The mandatory pr0n reference

[leoboiko]

It would be even better if they made an equivalent viewer for images.google.com.

This is useless

[kraf]

Quotes ? Previews ?
Quite useless if you ask me.

What I would like to see is the google equivalent of metaspy. The zeitgeist thing is nice, but I don't care for most categories.
I guess they see their query database as a valuable marketing resource, but then how come they are not selling access to it ?

Googlisms

[SPeW]

Hey have any of you checked out this site , not directly related to google.com but it does use their search results to return some pretty intereting stuff. check it out ... some funny stuff comes up for slashdot and Bill Gates

But google itself is going downhill fast

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they would put more effort into their search engines instead of this. I've recently noticed that google will change your search(!) on you (try kerosune, it doesn't just warn you that you may have a spelling error, it actually changes this to kerosene in the search text box, erasing your search. 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
something I've specifically told you is what I want to search on (and the back button doesn't keep your search word, so you have to retype it.

Also, google groups doesn't handle phrases at all.
Put in a phrase (with the quotes) like
"and to there" and you get

The "AND"operator is unnecessary -- we include all search terms by default. [details]
"to"is a very common word and was not included in your search. [details]

Huh? What 'AND' operator, 'and' is inside a phrase
and shouldn't be interpeted as a logical operator. And 'to' is part of a phrase and hence cannot be 'a very common word that was not included in your search'. Even when you don't get these kind of messages, the results are for the individual words, not the phrase.

Froogle sucks

[tekunokurato]

Sorry, but I tried getting some decent quotes and couldn't find anything good. Nowhere near as good as Pricewatch

Enough already!

[fleener]

These new Google services are more feature creep. How about less frill and better search?

The quality of search results is going down, in my opinion. More often I find myself using other search engines because my Google searches turn up junk. Let us tweak the ranking criteria so we can bypass the web sites that have engineered themselves to be at the top of the results.

of those three, froogle is the only one useful

[AssFace]

at least for me.
the first one is annoying and I have no need at all for it.
the best part about it is the cute little bunny icon.

the second one is also useless to me, I much prefer just a regular search with the small snippet from what is on that page, from that page - I don't care what other's say about it on their pages.

but I really like the froogle thing. aside from the naming scheme that is sesame street in style, it actually provides something useful in today's consumer world.
as long as we can buy things, we are a better people.
bless us jesus.

Semantic Web

[TuringTest]

Isn't this what the semantic web is supposed to achieve, but in the client side not in the server side? Instead of relaying on Google to supply new services from time to time, we would be able to use its database to build our own types of query.

Google Sets

[dmomo]

Google sets lets you enter a few items. Then it displays "like" items. If you want a list of publishers, enter a few.

I tried the following: ultima online, heroin, everquest, crack
And got:

Crack
EverQuest
Ultima Online
Heroin
Asheron's Call
Diablo
Starcraft
Interstate
Quake
Anarch y Online
Cocaine
Marijuana
The Realm
Amphetamines
Alcohol
Baldur's Gate
Shadowbane
Summary
Ecstasy
LSD
Jane's USAF

Re:In case the site is slashdotted...

[nolife]

To clarify the phrase..

Slashdotted

Yet another interesting Google function.

I don't know...

[__aaklbk2114]

but in the past, the stuff coming of of google labs seem to have much more of a cool factor. It was really innovative what they were bringing out...

however, none of these tools seem particularly interesting or even that useful.

I'd much rather use Price Grabber then froogle. I know it's a beta and all, but heck I can't even sort by the lowest price!

I'd say back to the lab with these ones.

Keyboard Shortcuts

[JooBYE]

I wish they would go ahead and place the keyboard shortcut features on the main search interface. Sure is a PITA to press tab when browsing on a TV display @ 640x480 when you don't want to use the mouse.
Plus I don't touch the mouse all that much.

Re:that's pretty neat..

[kpwoodr]

Check this one out, it's what I got when I quote searched for slashdot.org:

Quit Slashdot.org Today!

Funny Stuff

Re:In case the site is slashdotted...

[damiam]

The main Google site is impossible to slashdot - if everyone who ever looked at /. clicked a link to Google, it wouldn't even notice. However, Google's lab and beta servers aren't quite so resilient, and have been slashdotted in the past.