Thursday, April 7, 2005

Google Q&A

Google introduced a new feature: Q&A, Questions and Answers. You can now directly enter e.g. population of Japan or What is the population of Japan? and see an answer on top. Here are some more samples that yield a direct fact:

• Population of USA
• Population of Germany
• President of USA
• President of France
• Birthday of George Bush
• Birthday of Albert Einstein
• What is the birthday of Albert Einstein?
• Who was President of the USA in 1996?
  (Google’s Answer: “Pat Choate”)
• When did Isaac Asimov die?
• Isaac Asimov date of birth
• Isaac Asimov birthday
• What is the birthplace of Bono?
• Bono birthplace
• Bono birth place

Google always links to the source they cite. They screen-scrape a variety of sites, including Wikipedia, Yahoo Travel Info, or smaller personal pages. For example, a page containing the text “Date of Birth: 01/02/1920” under the headline “Isaac Asimov” provides an answer to “When did Isaac Asimov die.”

Do you have more examples of queries which result in a direct answer? Please share in the forum.

Google Q&A by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (0)

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