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. "

Did a search for Cmdrtaco's Phone Number...

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What the hell have you been doing Malda?

Go, Greasemonkey, Go

[halcyon1234]

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 [userscripts.org]

Yeah...

[Pojut]

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 :/

Goodbye google

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I hate the redesign. Obviously whoever thought that adding a useless sidebar to the left side of the page has never used a netbook, the 'redesign' makes the search results about 5 words wide. I've been forced to use the google mobile site in the meantime, while I try to find a crap/clutterless search engine like google used to be. I've been growing more and more dissatisfied with google's search results, finding more and more of the results are less and less relevant to what the search query was. Why show youtube videos in the web search results when there's a link to 'search videos' if I was so inclined to do so? Not relevant to the original search, and therefore just something that I need to scroll past to (hopefully) get to a relevant result. Clutter. Now the goddamn sidebar on the left. I knew that google would head downhill after it decided to become an advertising service, I just wish I would have been wrong.

Thanks google, it's been a slice, but your search engine has become an advertising engine, and that's just not something I'll be a part of anymore.

Re:Direct answers

[delinear]

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.

Has existed since '05

[Rufus211]

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 [capsgetpeeled.com]

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?

google has every right to copy ask.com

[circletimessquare]

i think the idea of patenting business ideas is absurd

but of course, the originator of a business idea deserves some recognition for being the first, and my comment is merely an attempt to give credit where credit is due

google's chrome browser is also happily gobbling up and incorporating good ideas pioneered by firefox and opera and safari, and stealing their market share by using their own ideas against them. that's ok by me. mainly because google is also doing some things that firefox, opera, nor safari ever did as well or at all. and perhaps google's version of ask.com will be better than ask.com itself. good, that's fine. but i'm not going to forget who pioneered the ideas

google is simply doing what microsoft is usually vilified for doing on slashdot. throughout the 1990s microsoft copied the pioneers, used their corporate heft to muscle the innovators out of their own niches, and dominated. now google is the new microsoft

its ugly. its the way of the capitalism: abuse of smaller players by bigger players is the inevitable reality of any marketplace, forever (in spite of hilarious libertarian fantasies of a marketplace of equals: utopian impossibility). it is what it is

but that doesn't mean i myself have to be ignorant of the true innovators in this world. nor should you

Re:It's now a computuational knowledge engine!

[hydroponx]

I was thinking more along the lines of True Knowledge [trueknowledge.com], 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...

Re:The 'Decision Engine' ?

[JoshuaJ]

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.

Re:The 'Decision Engine' ?

[gotpoetry]

I can. I swear it. How strange.