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