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Google Delivering Factual Answers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the delphi's-oracle-jealous dept.

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."

2 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And? by Vombatus · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Also, how does it determine which sites are authoritative in this manner? Is this relevance automated, or are Google employees entering in sites that they see as authoritative on the matter. For that matter, what is their criteria for deeming a site accurate?

    Basic research skills

    Do not trust one source of information - always corroborate it with another source.

    If one website says that the population of Portugal is 10.5 Million and another one says 20.5 Million, then there is obviously an error somewhere. If the second one says 10.1 Million, then you could probably live with the difference.

    Of course, how many 'average users' trust everything they read on the internet blindly and would never think to question the information?

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  2. Hate to say it, but Microsoft has done this alread by gregory · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Looks like google is the one playing catch up to microsoft this time. Microsoft search has had this feature since it was in beta. And it even gets teh president in 1996 question correct.

    http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=president+of+ united+states+in+1996&FORM=QBHP