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.

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?

[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.

Other interesting articles

[nich37ways]

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

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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 !!

Re:The mandatory pr0n reference

[leoboiko]

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

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

Re:In case the site is slashdotted...

[nolife]

To clarify the phrase..

Slashdotted

Yet another interesting Google function.