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."

AFP vs Google News

[fembots]

This is no doubt a good service for users, but will it attract complaints from site owners like AFP [slashdot.org]?

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?

And?

[DarkHelmet]

I know I'm just playing devil's advocate here... but...

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? :)

Not quite.

[Chess_the_cat]

Try searching for "Who was the President of the United States in 1996" and you get Pat Choate. What a joke. Try it. [google.com]

Google's new math: What is 1/0 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1%2F0&btnG=Go ogle+Search [google.com]Answer?

Slashdot effect

[d3matt]

Link [google.com]
Google knows about the slashdot effect.

Re:AFP vs Google News

[Anonymous Coward]

it probably works quite similarly to mit's START [mit.edu] natural language processor. reading mostly creative commons sites like wikipedia.

Alpha indeed

[pherthyl]

"Portugal population" works, but "portugal population" does not, neither does "population of Portugal"

So it's not very robust yet.. But it looks promising.

Re:And?

[np_bernstein]

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? :)

Paranoia aside, the CIA world fact book in an amazing resource. It's created for US diplomats, congressmen, and government employees as well as the general american populace. It contains pretty acurate, up to date information about different countries in the world. Honestly, I'm guessing that the CIA doesn't really care enough to doctor the listed ratio of women to men under the age of 25 for peru.

Do no evil is right...

[Momoru]

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"

Brainboost versus Google

[Twinbee]

It should be interesting to see how it compares to BrainBoost.com [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?

It doesn't matter

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

We have no idea how accurate the information will end up being

Google doesn't just serve up information like an oracle. It tells you the source where it obtained the information. They can serve up data by throwing round yarrow stalks and looking up the resulting patterns in ancient Chinese manuscripts for all I care. If they give their sources then why do we need to know what their algorithms are in order to judge their veracity?

Currency Calculator

[asdren]

I guess Google doesn't want to step on some toes but it bugs me they don't easily do currency conversion
'39 euros to usd'

integration with calculator

[ashot]

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 [google.com] / us population [google.com]

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 [google.com]

alright.. not that useful.. =]

Movie Showtimes / Reviews

[Amoeba Protozoa]

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:

Robots showtimes for 55419
1hr 30min - Rated PG - Animation/Comedy/SciFi/Fantasy - 58 reviews: (3.5 of 5 stars)

AMC Southdale 16 - 400 Southdale Center, Edina, MN - Map
11:10 1:30 4:00 6:30 9:15
AMC Mall of America 14 - 401 South Ave., Bloomington, MN - Map
1:20 2:20 3:40 4:40 6:40 7:40 9:20
More theaters ...

Pretty damned handy if you ask me!

Google "Robots 55419" Query [google.com]

Also, doing "NWA 0355" yields the status of Northwest Flight 0355 [google.com]...there are similar little things for weather [google.com] and even FedEx/UPS/USPS packages too.

Anybody aware of any other cools ones?

-AP

Re:Satisfactory answers.

[mikiN]

According to my Google, the answer is: Property.
Oh well, the Universe must have changed into something entirely different or Google doesn't like capitalized sentences...
See for yourself. [google.com]

Facts All Come With Points Of View

[cmd]

I am reminded of the Talking Heads lyric, "Facts all come with points of view." I'm not sure Google really wants to be in the business of determining what the facts are.

Another example

[Lord of Ironhand]

google query: who is cowboyneal

answer:

... is the online nickname ("handle") on Slashdot and other websites of Slashdot editor Jon Pater.

Who'd have thought.

Re:And?

[Ersatz Chickenweed]

I realize the "Is there a god?" post was a joke, but I searched it on Google anyway just for a hoot, and I noticed something interesting...

If you search for "Is there a god?", Google informs you that it left the words "is" and "a" out of the search since they're so common. What's odd is that, if you just search for "there god?" (leaving out "is" and "a" like the search supposedly does), you get an _entirely_ different set of results.

What gives? It's obvious that Google actually IS processing those very common words and returning search results based on them despite claiming otherwise (since the exact phrases showed up in the respective searches, common words and all), but why would they go to the trouble of claiming that they're omitting search terms when they really aren't?

Maybe I'm just slow for not noticing this years ago, but I still find it intriguing.

Re:EXAMPLE: What is a first post?

[Lord Ender]

Here is another good one.

What is 42?
forty-two: being two more than forty

Clearly, this feature is not complete.

Re:And?

[ricotest]

Google ranks results higher if the words are closer together. So it does its initial search for 'There God' but then looks for the phrase 'Is there a god?' when sorting them.