Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is no doubt a good service for users, but will it attract complaints from site owners like AFP?
Personally I would rather get the answer without going into a site and read through things to find it, and if I want to, I can click on the link and find out more from the site. However the content providers will certainly want you to come to their sites as soon as possible, look around and maybe explore other sections?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
People criticize Wikipedia for being something that gets information from online sources. At least Wikipedia has a fellowship of users to prevent abuse, or misinformation from being on a topic.
Yes, I know some of the answers will be coming from Wikipedia (And people wonder why google is supporting them). But what about the other sites?
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?
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?
Google may be cool, but most of its algorithms and technology are closed. We have no idea how accurate the information will end up being, and also, how corruptible.
After all, who trusts what the CIA tells us about anything? :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Try searching for "Who was the President of the United States in 1996" and you get Pat Choate. What a joke. Try it.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1%2F0&btnG=Go ogle+SearchAnswer?
"Portugal population" works, but "portugal population" does not, neither does "population of Portugal"
So it's not very robust yet.. But it looks promising.
Well I guess they really are out to do no evil, as this idea is completely counter-productive to the current way they make money, which is by essentially getting people to click paid for search results. If the answer i'm looking for is told to me right at the top, random people will be less likely to click "Find more Jane Fonda at Ebay.com"
It should be interesting to see how it compares to BrainBoost.com
:)
Out of the 27 question I gave Google from the BrainBoost.com front page, it answered 9 of them. Ask Jeeves also answered 9 of them, but a slightly different set. BrainBoost got them all 'right', but then they are the questions that BrainBoost selected
Here are the ones Google got right:
Where is Iraq?
How many people live in Israel?
Who is the CEO of Amazon.com?
Who is Thad Starner?
What is solar wind?
When was Cameron Diaz born?
What is a calorie?
Here are the ones Ask Jeeves got right:
How many people live in Israel?
What is the capital of Indonesia?
Who was the 3rd president of the US?
What is solar wind?
When was Cameron Diaz born?
What is a calorie?
What does HTML stand for?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
they should integrate it with the calculator.. won't be too useful now probably but, perhaps one day. You could already do simple things with what they have:
us defense budget / us population
I'm not sure how much semantic understanding is built into the system, but if they had some then lots of interesting things could come up as well("country with the highest defense spending", "Is there a correlation between x and y for z?")..
interestingly, while the diameter of planets doesn't work, the radius of planets does register with the calculator:
proportion of earth to jupiter
alright.. not that useful.. =]
-ashot
Probably old news to many but...
If you search for a title of a recent movie, or optionally add a ZIP code it will give you the aggregate out of five "star score" and a list of theaters and showtimes near you for the given film.
A search for "Robots 55419" yields the following:
Pretty damned handy if you ask me!
Also, doing "NWA 0355" yields the status of Northwest Flight 0355...there are similar little things for weather and even FedEx/UPS/USPS packages too.
Anybody aware of any other cools ones?
-AP