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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.
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.
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
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.