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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.
News source: Macworld
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.
News source: Macworld
Portugal population: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MS...ugal+population
Who is Jane Fonda?: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?FORM=MS...s+Jane+Fonda%3F
I think Yahoo will follow soon.
Yahoo! France already does.
And surprise surpise, they also use Wikipedia for the answers.
Seems very likely because both Google and Yahoo happen to host Wikipedia servers nowadays.
I think they've made a deal
"MSN Search did this a few months ago. "
Yes, and "years" for Ask Jeeves.
Doesn't stop it from being good to have though.
And Ask Jeeves was probably first, counting all of them. It was part of their idea to make their engine unique.
edit: Oh, cool, Google also use Wikipedia!! This just HAVE to be a thing from both Google and Yahoo recently starting to host the Wikipedia servers!
Last edited by 21023 on 08 Apr 2005 - 02:41
when i can type "make coffee" and google starts my coffee machine then i'll be impressed
i'm sure it's only like 3 weeks away too
i can't wait
heh google cant make it for u but can tell u so much abt it u'll never drink coffe again
nice info
Good to see that Google is aiming World Domination!
I love Google and a lot that they've done, but this isn't an original feature.
MSN started doing it months ago.
Just more proof of Googles domination of the world.
-welcomes new search overloards-
heh, google knows everything. though only seems to work on google.com, google.co.uk doesn't have the feature
Edit: Already posted sorry!
I don't get it...
Their "movie:" thing is also brain dead for me using google.se...
It actually tries to search, but don't match anything.
Maybe it think it MUST give me swedish reviews, but of course it doesn't.
How about giving me the next best, english ones? doh...
"What is the population of Sweden?"
gives:
Sweden
Population: 8,986,400 (July 2004 est.)
According to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2119.html
In case of "population of Europe", well, I think it only supports countries.
UK works btw:
United Kingdom
Population: 60,270,708
According to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html - More sources »
Maybe you should check the CIA World Factbook and see for yourself what public intelligence CIA has about countries. It's a heck of a lot actually, down to number of e.g. avg telephones and TV's per inhabitant, military alliances, country analyses, etc. Quite interesting reads.
Really? Casue it's not doing that for me.
Great feature. I am a fan of Google. I believe that their technology is great!
So, just to be clear, If I type
who is Jane Fonda?
into google, I don't get anything but the usualy Google search results and those useless ****ing "Paid" results (which I hate).
And before one of you noobs chimes in with 'So use the .com version..
hey, guess what happens if I type google.com into my browser?
First one to gues correctly wins a lifetime supply of Canadian snow (some conditions apply).
I win
Just idding, I am stationed in Germany and ad the same problem. What I had to do was delete my google cookies then type in google.com, google will check your location and bring back google.ca, there is a little link (or was for me that said go to google.com, click on that and google . com should now be the google that you use. you can also I think go into preferences and choose which one you want. Hope this helps
You can claim your snow from October through to to March, any winter.
Snow: It's not just for Igloos anymore.
Go Google! Thanks for trying to run the world!
where in the world carmen sandiego?
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