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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. "
No hits. Damn! Lots of porn hits though, so not a total loss.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
1 / 0. Now Google is down. :(
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What the hell have you been doing Malda?
Bing!
Bing!
Bing!
(Wolfram Alpha?)
is just rip off http://ask.com/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This concerns me. If it is just a gathering of facts from the top sites - who is to say that information is even accurate. I find lots of sites that all reference each other with the same false information.
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
I think so. The truth is, I was very excited about wolframalpha when it became available. And then I realized I don't really need it.
In the instances where I truly need to ask a question, it's usually too complicated, and I have to search for articles discussing a specific topic instead.
new sig
Are you saying they actually took something that wasn't theirs without permission? Or are you just trying to demonize the natural human process of copying a useful solution one observes from others?
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.
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
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?
Four o'clock already?
*glances at pocket watch*
Sorry old chap but it would appear your clock is wrong.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
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...
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.
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 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.
I can. I swear it. How strange.