Google Adds Instant Answers, Just Like Almost Everyone Else
Google has decided to pull a page from MSN and Jeeves’s playbook: The popular concept of providing direct, instant answers to questions atop the search results. An excellent move, because those answers are one of the things that keeps pushing me to MSN Search. On Monday, I was doing a story about New York State’s budget negotiations, and I quickly needed to know what the population of New York is. I started typing Google into my address bar, but realized MSN was a better bet. As a search company, any search company, your only goal should be to avoid situations like that.
Oh, and the population of New York State is 19,227,088 according to MSN. According to Google, it is 18,976,457.
New York
Population: 18,976,457 ; 3rd, 12/00
According to http://www.50states.com/newyork.htm - More sources »
Check out that more sources link. Its pretty cool.
Anyway, Google calls this Q&A, and you can get results with or without asking a question. For example, Google Blogoscoped shows population of japan and What is the population of Japan? both get you your answer.
As you can see, since Google did source it, these results are scraped from various sites around the web. This is pretty much par for the course with Google, which chooses to almost never make its own content, and finds it more important to organize that content. What it also means is that Google could theoretically have much more answers than MSN or Jeeves could code in by hand, but its answers stand to be less accurate. I’m sure we’ll soon start to see answers that are just plain wrong, grabbed from pages that just plain made a mistake.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of New York at the last census (in 2000) was indeed 18,976,457. Their estimated 2004 population was 19,227,088, according to this PDF from the Census Bureau. However, finding that information in Google took me about ten minutes of searching. In MSN, its an instant answer.
Because MSN’s answers are coded by hand, it can look deeper into the web, past the first search result to find a more recent, accurate answer. While Google is stuck with the enormously well-linked 2000 census report, MSN can find the less cited, but far more recent 2004 estimate. There will always be that sort of limitation in any algorithm based solution, that is, until our algorithms become smarter than we are.
Not to say it isn’t a useful feature. Not to say the answer Google gave wasn’t good enough for an article. And not to say that Google isn’t likely to have more answers than MSN. The only thing is, MSN’s are almost guaranteed to be right, and Google’s can never be perfect.
Oh, and here’s part of what the Google Blog is going to say later, direct from Google PR (proving the blog is far too coordinated with PR to be a real blog):
Just the facts, fast
Have you ever needed a piece of info right now? Today we’re excited to introduce Google Q&A. We’ve pulled together facts from all over the Web to help give you the fastest possible access to the quick bits of information you need every day; just type a query into the search box, and you’ll get back the answer at the top of your search results. Q&A knows about a lot of areas: celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics, movies, and anything else we’ve thought of so far (including enabling you to get answers on your mobile device). Try it out, and keep checking back. This is only the beginning.Jonathan Betz
Tech lead for Google Q&A
But how did you get their blog entry? Why would the PR give it to you?
Comment by Noam | April 7, 2005
Standard press email, although if I were them I would have left the blog post out of it. Google: let the blog be a blog! You get tons of press, so why not have one place where PR isn’t job one? If you need help, I’m sure the guys at Jeeves will help out
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | April 7, 2005
do have sites for instant answers ie a sort of instant chart
Comment by ik | April 15, 2005