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Google Type Operator  (View post)

Lawrence R [PersonRank 1]

Friday, May 5, 2006
18 years ago4,599 views

Searching for "Type:George Bush" comes up with "George Bush – Type: Person".

Here are some other searches that yielded these results:

Type:Boston -> "Boston – Type: Place"

Type:FEMA -> "FEMA – Type: Acronym"

Type:Google -> "Google – Type: Public (NASDAQ: GOOG)"

Type:Orange -> "Orange – Type: Monopoly Color"

Type:Bear -> "Bear – Type: Animal"

Type:Doom -> "Doom (Movie) – Type: Movie"

Type:Friends -> "Friends – Type: TV Show"

Type:February -> "February – Type: Month"

Lawrence R [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

A lot of those were mentioned in the original article, which I should have read =)

I'd bet money that this is a glimpse into the internal workings of Google – specifically how they (in the future perhaps?) decide what searches should have a onebox result at the top. Anything that is a "term" could have a definition-style onebox, anything that is a "Movie" could have a Movie-style onebox, etc, etc. So, the "type:" of the term you input into Google determines what onebox will be displayed.

Brandon Byers [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Yep. It also sounds like the beginnings of the Semantic Web (try the first result for the phrase "Google Takes All" for a good essay; Wikipedia also has good info).

Scott [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

In playing with this operator, I found that if you want only the onebox, you can try a search like:

type_britney

type_harry potter

This doesn't quite work with, for example, type_boston – but only because type_boston appears in the URL www.russet.jp/item/type_boston.html.

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

it's not an operator. try [type iran]

Compare with [define:iran] vs [define iran].

On a related note, I remember there was a discussion a couple of months ago. Someone saw on a Google SERP for Apple a question [do you want more pages about the fruit, Apple Computers?]. I couldn't find a post about that.

Lawrence R [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

It's interesting to note, however, that "type iran" emboldens the text and what not, whereas "type:iran" doesn't.

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Certainly it is in't take it as an operator; it actually answers as it considers as a question (IMHO).

president:India
   is taken as
president of India

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

You can use "type", "type:" or "type of" to trigger this onebox. Maybe it's not an operator in the classic sense, but I think you can still call it an operator. For example, Google lists "define:" as an official operator on the operators page http://www.google.com/help/operators.html and yet we can use both "define:", "define", and "what is" to trigger web definitions. Maybe we can call something like "what is" or "type of" a "soft operator"?

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