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Google Delivering Factual Answers
nam37 wrote in about a Macworld article which reads: "Google
Inc. on Thursday began delivering factual answers for some queries at the
top of its results page, to save users from having to navigate over to other
sites and look for the information. For example, if a user enters the query
'Portugal population,' Google returns the answer -- 10.5 million -- along with a
link to the Web page where the information came from, which in this case is the
population page of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Factbook. The
query 'who is Jane Fonda?' triggers the answer '... is an Academy Award winning
American actress, model, writer, producer, activist and philanthropist' and
provides the link to the Wikipedia online encyclopedia's entry for the actress.
A small percentage of queries currently trigger these factual answers, but the
service, called Google Q&A, is in its early stages, said Peter Norvig,
Google's director of search quality."
I did try it. When I read the sentence, it said, "Pat Choate was the 1996 Reform Party of the United States of America Vice President candidate."
It is not saying the person is the answer to your question, though I guess you might have to actually read what it says to discern that.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Of course, there's a link to the site in question, but as is asked of Wikipedia all the time, what level of accountability is there that this information is correct?
Usually from a free service, there is no accountability. If you need an answer to a question, and you need to hold someone accountable for that answer, there are a number of paid research organizations that are willing to find what you need for money.
Also it doesn't work when searching from a one of the localized googles, such as google.ca. The search needs to be done at google.com.
Umm.. I've tried the queries in the comment, none of them seem to work for me. Maybe cuz I'm using google.ca?
Compare the formatting for the question from the article, who is jane fonda, with another question: what is google.
You can do a similar comparison between a couple of search terms from other postings: what is the slashdot effect vs. who was president of the usa in 1996.
Google (currently) appears to format answers it's sure about (what's google, what's the slashdot effect) with an icon and a link to "define:term". Fuzzier matches (Jane Fonda and the putative president) get the nonsequitur text "Property:" and an "According to:" disclaimer.
This looks like something interesting, but clearly still in the early beta. Which is *great*! I love getting a peek behind the curtain.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Pr0n is written leet slang for pornography.
//. [Usenet, IRC] Pornography. Originally this referred only to Internet
pr0n:
porn but since then it has expanded to refer to just about any kind.
I took a double take too. It's the same Peter Norvig all CS guys with some AI background should recognize by name. Google is one company that deserves to employee PhDs, and I'm sure guys like Norvig do well in Google's research environment.
He has a pretty cool CV too. Check it out:
http://www.norvig.com/vita.html
Besides his Google gig, he has been Division Chief of Computer Sciences at NASA, a senior scientist at Sun in the early 90's, a researcher at Berkeley, and a prof. at USC.
He's also famous for creating Powerpoint slides for the Gettysburg Address:
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm
I know both of these are jokes, but this isn't actually the feature that is being refered to here. Rather this is what used to be the google glossary, you can use the define tag to get the definitions explicitly:& hl=en&lr=&c2c off=1&q=define%3Afirst%20post&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?num=100
-ashot
no, those are actual responses generated by the "glossary" feature which has been built in for about a year (and available longer under labs). You can use it with the 'define:' tag.
Test it out yourself, "define:us population" returns nothing, whereas it does return an answer on the google front page. They are awfully similar things it seems, I don't really know what the difference is per se (maybe answers are meant to be very short, exact, I dunno), but they are seperate features in Google..
-ashot
http://www.google.com/help/features.html
Here is a list of all those features
The "what is" searches are taking from glossary. "what is foo" returns the first entry from "define:foo" along with a slightly re-ordered web search for "foo". This is a rather minor new feature: really just a UI tweak.
The ability to search for facts is new, unrelated, and much more impressive (even if there aren't many facts in it yet).
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
I don't get it, it works on www.google.com but not on the international sites.
Hope they add this feature to these sites soon though.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=safa ri&rls=en-us&q=what+is+a+googol
A google is not a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. You're thinking of a googol.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Or....maybe because the actual word is googol. Got this interesting little fact from their corporate information page . Of course, since I did get both of these links from Google, they're probably wrong.
Try spelling it correctly:
What is googol
IHBT.
... or you could just go to Portugal's statisical office. From where their population data is availible with one click.
The point is that there are definitive sources of information on the internet for various subjects, as long as you're aware of them.
I think that what they are telling you is that they don't search their index for "is" and "a". That doesn't mean that it doesn't matter when they are sorting the results by relevance though, which usually give the same result, even though not necessarily. If you, for instance, would search for a term that only are used on a few pages which don't have the word "is" on them, you'd get the results anyway if you don't explicitly state that "is" should be included.
I'd guess that is one of those things that seam more important to the programmer than it actually is for the user.
This looks like a joke, but it is actually true.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
5 + 6 = 11
the answer to life the universe and everything = 42
Don't worry, Google's down with it.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
You MUST be a 'softie'. You mixed apples and oranges, carefully gaming MSN to get the right answer...
Try giving MSN the same question Google was set to answer:
Try it. Not much better, is it?
I hope they pay you well...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.