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Google To Answer Your Questions Directly
RabbitWho writes "Last week Google launched a redesign of its search results page, and is now introducing some changes to the content of its results too. The company says it will directly answer 'millions of different fact-seeking searches' with short answers at the top of its results. Search for 'Catherine Zeta-Jones date of birth', for instance, and the date shows up at the top, along with where Google is pulling the information from. Google says the feature is based on Google Squared, the experimental search tool it rolled out a year ago that gathers facts from the around the Web and presents them in an organized way. "
Google always used to suggest corrections if it suspected your search was misspelled, a feature I appreciated. But now in some cases it automatically changes the search for you and returns results for what *it thinks* you wanted to search for. Notice the mismatch between the search term and the search results; "axel" is a figure-skating jump, "axle" is "a central shaft for a rotating wheel or gear".
Clippy, is that you??
I tried it out. They don't just provide the fact, they say who the sources are (either domain name or, by clicking "Show Sources" the direct URLs). So if you find a fact on Google, you can check the sources to make sure it is reputable.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I asked: number of planets in solar system
Of the three: wolfram, bing, google; only wolfram alpha has some faint idea what I actually look for.
But wolfram only parsed 'planets' from the sentence.
So, if i asked 'number of planets in the fridge', it answered the SAME.
Still, a long way.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Try "genghis khan height"
No misinformation here!
Use http://www.google.com/search?hl=all, problem solved. If you're using Firefox, just right click the search bar and select Add to search bar...
No, wolframalpha is a math search/AI thingy. You're thinking of TrueKnowledge. It's pretty cool, but it also hideously ugly. Which is a shame, because they had a pretty attractive design when it was a closed beta a few months ago.
The government can't save you.
Yep, one thing I find a little surprising is that we already see those "question answering" features (as broken as they might be), while I haven't yet seen a search engine that lets you search for "things" instead of "words".
When I search for "Saturn" I want the search engine to be able to tell the difference between Saturn the car, Saturn the planet, Saturn the gaming console and all the other Saturn that might be out there. One can often accomplish that manually by being a bit more specific (i.e. Sega Saturn instead of just Saturn), but sometimes its close to impossible to do that. With games for example it can be extremely hard to narrow down the search to a specific system, as every gaming site out there has all the systems listen in the navbar and thus will trigger even when the side itself has nothing to do with the system.
I have no such option on my Google search results pages. I can hide all of the options but I can't make the sidebar go away.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.