Which queries worked well for you, which didn't? Any other comments on the Google Family Tree site? Please share.

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/?q=Timothy+Leary no results

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/?q=Fidel+Castro some results

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/?q=Satan

see "Father" :D

Sometimes when there's no resulf for the full name, it helps to use just the last name. E.g. "Leary" instead of "Timothy Leary". Of course, depending on how common the last name is, this may also increase false results.

Both "Hemingway" and "Ernest Hemingway" performed poorly.

George Bush

According to the program his wife or husband is:

- not born in the Brookfield Zoo

I'm unconvinced.

Philipp,

This is incredibly cool! I did Hussein and got some great results.

even jesus (it's a famous person, isn't he ? :P) is giving nice results (except maybe the weird fact about his brother : "starting to look like small potatoes"... but it must mean something :D)

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/?q=buddha Buddha's sister

"about the best stuff out there"

<:D

i typed in Mel Gibson and got back garbage.....only thing that made sence was a movie son....you suck big time

"George W. Bush", "George W Bush", "John F Kerry", and "John Kerry" all yield no results at all?!

"George Bush" gets results, but it seems to get GW and GHW mixed up, e.g. mentions brother the governor, but also has a son.

The Google Family Tree just pretends to have real intelligence. In fact, as it should be obvious, it googles all its knowledge, instantly and dynamically. However as soon as I find time I might be able to tweak some details. The thing will never be able to correctly differentiate between George Bush sr. and George Bush jr., as no human would either: if you ask someone about "George Bush" he or she would either *assume* you mean George W. Bush/ George Bush Jr., or ask back at you. Of course to program this kind of intelligence would take years of AI development, and even then the results wouldn't be too good (even today, scientists didn't figure out how to write perfectly smart-sounding bots).

No results for:

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gloria Steinem
Angelina Grimke
Abraham Lincoln
Rachal Carson
Sarah Jessica Parker

I think this is a wide variety of names, and I really thought that Stowe and Grimke, coming from families that had several famous people in them, would return results.

If you can get this program working well, it could be extremely useful.

I'm scared.

Satan's sister – and I quote:

"• coming to town on monday!"

-Rob

What a waist of time! no results on George W. Bush???????

whitney houston didnt work.

neither did tony danza

Andy Kaufman sure was lonely :(

Ahaha
That don't fuct really well, so the most result appear a joke and no really convincing me =P

Look this on 4 esemple:
http://blogoscoped.com/tree/?q=Jesus+Christ

Jesus wasn't alone :rotfl:

Very nice presentation – I'm working on something vaguely similar and hadn't thought much about how to present it.

I guess the query is "x's daughter was" etc. For living people, "x's daughter is" might give better results sometimes.

Why no link to the reference found?

Tony, yes, the algorithm works like this. I'm actually using "was", "is", "had", and "has" in this order – I will only check for the next if there's no result for something in order to speed it up (and I'm only displaying very few results in the first place because of space).

I tried Jim Carrey, and only got something for mother and husband/wife, but the one for mother wasquite funny, saying "a whore or something that used TV as a babysitter"

Everything is cut off!

umm george wwashington performed very baddly

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/?q=Page

gives something ;)

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/?q=Jackson

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/?q=Rama

interesting..

Hi,

great idea. Here's what i tried looking for:

a) Rajeev Gandhi/ Rajiv Gandhi
b) Indira Gandhi (his mom)
c) David Beckham
d) Victoria Beckham

None of them worked very well. Only fathers sections were filled in to some extent. The rest were blank.

Any chance of us looking at the code ?

- Mayuresh

Sure. Here's the source code to the Google Family Tree (it's PHP):

http://blogoscoped.com/tree/source.txt

By the way, I'm using NUSOAP here.

this is my step daddy's name and I think he is a member of the "real" google