Slashdot Mirror
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. "
Cmdrtaco Slashdot User | Free Download Nokia Apps, Games, Themes ... ... Nokia Mural 6750 Rubberized Phone Protector Case with Optional Belt Clip - Black. ...
CmdrTaco - Slashdot User. When a man steals your wife, there is no
www.ne63.com/search/cmdrtaco+slashdot+user - Cached
What the hell have you been doing Malda?
I was going to write a Greasemonkey script, but there's already a ton of them to address this bug.
Here's one that seems to work: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/76060
UTF-8: There and Back Again
See, I like this idea...but the Google redesign is kinda nasty. I don't know if they are trying to emulate the way Bing looks, or if they are trying to fix something that wasn't broken...but something about it just isn't right.
I know that doesn't make sense, considering that search results are MUCH less cluttered now than they were before...but something about it just doesn't feel like Google :/
Living With a Nerd
Google has had the ability to display a subset of specific information for a while - so times, calculations, currency conversion, etc. It sounds like this is intended to increase the scope of that by trying to answer some of the more popular free text queries.
Google has been answering simple questions since 2005. It was the first 20% time project a friend of mine worked on when he joined the company. I remember that if you asked it "where in the world is Carmen Sandiego" it inexplicably said "Cairo, Egypt". Here's a screen cap showing exactly that from 2005:
http://www.capsgetpeeled.com/blog/archives/000473.html
I remember Slashdot had an article about this back then and there's was a google blog or press release, but I can't find either. Anyone remember what this feature was called or have a link?
I was thinking more along the lines of True Knowledge, this project has been in private beta for about 2 years and just in the last 6 months was opened up for public beta testing. What it has so far is limited, but it is growing steadily.
Disclaimer: I do not work for True Knowledge, Google, or Wolfram Alpha, I have just been helping out with beta testing true knowledge since it was a private beta system...
Actually, Google started providing answers to specific questions (flight info, math problems, UPS tracking numbers) several years ago, long before either Bing or Alpha existed, and I seem to recall experiments with more general queries like birthdays. Now I guess they're expanding these existing features by integrating with the Google Squared Database. And this is fundamentally different from a product like Alpha, and very much in keeping with what google has always done best: find the information you're looking for wherever it might be on the Internet and get you to it as quickly as possible. Alpha has hand-made databases designed specifically to answer a selected set of questions on closed categories of data -- google actually tries to parse the text and structure of web pages to figure out a likely answer, so its database is the entire internet. This has inherent weaknesses, but based on google's history I think we'll see continuous incremental improvements in this feature until in a few years we'll take it completely for granted.
I can. I swear it. How strange.