Earth: Mostly Harmless

The Google Skynet awakens

December 1, 2006 on 1:48 am |
Categories: google, technology
Tags: google, technology

I picked up an interesting tidbit about one of the new features Google has added to Google Documents:

How can I use spreadsheets to answer some of my many questions about the world?

The GoogleLookup function attempts to answer your question using the web, with information about people, places and things, like the population of Japan, the mass of Jupiter, or the place of birth of Abraham Lincoln.

Keep in mind that, while the GoogleLookup function knows quite a bit, it doesn’t know everything. Not all of the formulas that you might try will work, but we encourage you to experiment with the function and see what does work.

So far, so Ask on steroids. But the syntax is particularly interesting:

Syntax: =GoogleLookup("entity", "attribute")

where "entity" represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and "attribute" is the type of information that you want to retrieve.

It would seem that Google are making some pretty nice clustering and natural language query technology available to the public, at least within the constraints of the spreadsheet system. It would be really nice if everyone could use this as a web service.