Comment of the Day: GoogleLookUp is "Wow"
Today's winning comment comes from our feature-by-feature comparison of Office Live Workspace and Google Docs. In the post Sarah Perez concluded that "Google Docs, although limited in its capabilities, offers real-time collaboration", while "Office Live Workspace [...] may not have the collaboration features of Google Docs, but the workspaces feature is unique." As usual when we compare Google with Microsoft office products, the discussion was feisty. Jrome's comment stood out though: he pointed to a compelling feature in Google Docs called GoogleLookUp. He explains below:
Congratulations Jrome, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.
UPDATE: Jrome, your email address had an error, so please contact us at tips@readwriteweb.com to claim your prize.
"Hey Sarah,
If you want to focus on "everyman" features, why not to highlight the awesome GoogleLookUp function?Here are the few steps:
1. Create a Google Spreadsheet
2. Tape "bmw" in A2, "mercedes" in A3 and "nissan" in A4
3. Select A2:A4 and, while holdind the Ctrl key, expand your selection until A50.
4. Say "wow"
5. Tape "employees" from B2 to B50.
6. Enter "=googlelookup(A2; B2)" in C2 and expand the formula until C50
7. "wow", againHere are some of the types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup, and a few popular attribute names:
Countries and Territories (like "Burkina Faso"): population, capital, largest city, gdp
U.S. States (like "Tennessee"): area, governor, nickname, flower
Rivers (like "Amazon River"): origin, length
Cities and Towns (like "Chicago"): state, mayor, elevation
Musicians (like "John Lennon"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
Actors (like "Audrey Hepburn"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
Politicians (like "Anwar Al-Sadat"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
U.S. Presidents (like "Zachary Taylor"): date of birth, place of birth, political party
Baseball Players (like "Wade Boggs"): games, at bats, earned run average, position
Chemical Elements (like "Helium"): atomic number, discovered by, atomic weight
Chemical Compounds (like "Isopropyl Alcohol"): chemical formula, melting point, boiling point, density
Stars (like "Betelgeuse"): constellation, distance, mass, temperature
Planets (like "Saturn"): number of moons, length of day, distance from sun, atmosphere
Dinosaurs (like "Velociraptor"): height, weight, when it lived
Ships (like "USS Chesapeake"): length, displacement, complement, commissioned
Companies (like "Hewlett-Packard"): employees, ceo, ticker9. Take a look at other Google functions in the "Google" tab of this page: http://documents.google.com/support/spreadsheets/bin/answer.py?answer=82712&ctx=
10. "wow", again and againThese are the reasons why web-based apps are far more superior than desktop-based ones. And with more and more microformats, I bet this funtion will definitely improve the way we organize information. That could make a pretty corporate goal ;-)"
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"These are the reasons why web-based apps are far more superior than desktop-based ones."
I think what you are describing could equally be implemented in desktop applications. It is just a matter of making the connector to the information "in the cloud"
The app itself doesn't need to be in the cloud to do this. Just connected somewhere.
You are correct that more microformats and other methods of semantically marking up content on the web will help search engines (and that's the power behind the wow here) provide more than bland HTML.
All of this said, those features are pretty cool.
Wow! That is cool.
ok.. I'll say wow :D
A big fan of "new things", BUT, I (thought) I followed your instructions on how to do this, opened a spreadsheet, put in the terms, etc. and nada, nothing. My reaction? Never want to see these things again. I may have spent years and years trying to understand Excel, and now use it only now and then, but why am I going to try when my very first experience is so bad? Oh, I know. Very unfair. But I don't NEED to change excel do I so I have no incentive to solve this little problem.
Agree with Nick Hodge - this says more about the possibilities of semantic markup than about web vs desktop apps.
I tried it with a couple of travel things, like visitor numbers for big cities and fleet size for a few airlines, and the hit rates varied wildly. But as a glimpse of what features like this could do in the future it's great.
Thanks for the tip.
"far more superior than"
Okay, I hate to single you guys out here, but I would absolutely LOVE it if blogs were to dial it back a bit with regard to butchering the English language.
Thanks for the GoogleLookUp tip nonetheless!
Wow. This is big.
When I first read this, I tried to compare it to previous events that I perceived as significant. Over the past 12 hours, I've come to the conclusion that this is the most significant thing I've seen on the web since I first saw Google in 1998 or 1999. This is the most impressive thing I've seen in the last 10 years.
Google Lookup is about computers doing a non-trivial piece of cognitive work that would normally only be done by a human using complex pattern-matching and information synthesis skills. If that is true, this changes the playing field dramatically.
Removal of humans from that process helps reduce the cost of that work to zero...which permits new market applications and which frees up humans for the higher-level processing tasks.
This is big.
"Wow!", indeed.
I really doubt this is true semantic search at work here, and is more likely, "intelligent" pointing of the google machinery at already structured repositories, like financial news databases, encyclopedias, etc..
The semantic web is slowly being built, but this isn't it. Having spent the last 7-8 years on enterprise search, and with some experience reaching into those companies who are trying weave a semantic web even "simply" in their own organization (pharma companies for example), the automatic/machine-generated semantic web isn't even CLOSE to reality. There is still a heavy manual component, although with sufficient groundwork, computers can do quite a bit of the later/downstream "heavy lifting."
That said - this is pretty darn cool. And as one of the commenters pointed out though, being able to do web-based lookups in a spreadsheet doesn't mean that the spreadsheet (or any other app) needs to be "on the web" itself.
Anyone else recall OpenDoc from MANY years ago? This was all demoed and possible quite some time ago.
I'll just repeat a William Gibson phrase - "The future is already here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed."
I'm not saying 'Wow' -- because I don't think you've given instructions that work on a Mac.
What is the alternative to holding down the 'Ctrl' key?