We had a quick look at the basic functionality of Google a couple of weeks ago - but there's a lot more to the big G than your basic common-or-garden search. Google as a company is famous for the sheer brain-power of its staff, the vast majority of whom have at least one if not more PhDs under their belts. They also, obviously, have an enormous database of information (6 billion webpages and counting) which can be put to uses other than straight forward text searches. In order to make the most of these gigantic resources, it is part of Google policy that 20% of an employee's time must be spent on their own projects, some of which end up forming part of Google Labs.
The majority of the Google Labs services on offer are in what's known as 'public beta' - which is techy-speak for "things that generally work fine and are available for people to use, but possibly still have some bugs to be worked through and aren't quite ready for a full-scale launch". A lot of the applications are very useful, and even the ones that are not are jolly impressive from a technical point of view.
A sterling example of an app that falls into the latter category is
Google Sets, a genius bit of programming that allows you to enter a couple of items in a search and then predicts, as the name would suggest, other items in that particular set. For example, a Google Sets search for "Hugh" and "Pugh", duly brings up a result of "Barney McGrew", "Cuthbert", "Dibble" and "Grub". This is an astounding bit of computation and contextualised searching on Google's part, but its practical use is a little unclear. Another issue with it is that it does not specify exactly which set it brings up, and so does occasionally require some discretion on the part of the user; for instance, my search for "Margaret Thatcher", "John Major" and "Tony Blair" brought up a set of completely random British politicians, as opposed to the "British Prime Ministers" set that I was specifically hoping for. In any case, it's a fun toy to play around with.
Much more useful is
Google Scholar - all the power of a Google search within academic journals and papers. As with an ordinary Google search, the results are organised according to relevance, and this relevance ranking takes into account "the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications". Amazingly useful.
Arguably the coolest thing to yet be cultivated in the Google Labs is
Google Maps. Currently covering the United States, the UK and Canada, these are draggable, zoomable interactive maps that you can search by location, services in or near that location and directions to and from a location. Especially fun is the 'satellite' option, which gives you a bird's eye photographic view of wherever you're trying to find.
Other natty little Google widgets include alerts, a video search and personalised Google homepages. A full list can be found
here.
Published on 22nd January 2007
