Google: Warm Mangos & Search Engine Operators

Larry Page at Google was having some difficulty determining why mangoes warm &/or ripen when enclosed in paper bags or confined spaces. In the interest of folks performing such non-trivial search queries, and in the honor of the “warm mango”, we offer up this search operator guide. A more in-depth version of the guide is also available in a more printer/reader friendly format (PDF). » read more

Google News Show Glitches

UPDATE – this issue appears resolved as of 5/13/2011, re: this thread @ Google AJAX APIs Group. Remember to flush your site’s cache after reverting to default, “en”, or “en-US”.

So after posting the Twitter glitch post, I loaded up the site, only to discover that Google News Show (Newsshow in some sources) is only showing text and not images. A quick web search revealed some folks are only seeing blank pages, e.g., as described here. A little more digging revealed that a workaround is possible for this by adding the following code to the News Show loader script:

    var loadOptions = {packages : ["newsshow"]};

    loadOptions.language = "en-GB";

    google.load("elements", "1", loadOptions);

The default language is “en” if not specified. However, “en” and “en-US” are experiencing problems, and so “en-GB”, “es”, and “fr” can create a news show that looks like it should, and only appears to affect the language used to display next & previous links at the bottom of the show. For more info, consult:

• Google AJAX APIs Group (user news show bug query)
• Google Bug Report 582 (suggested the en-GB solution)
• Google News Show Dev Site (for news show)
• Google News Show Playground (default, more options)
• Google News Show Web Element (iframe only)

Help share this information with others @ reddit.

Google gets xkcd about future…

In honor of the ‘Future Timeline’ cartoon published recently in xkcd, I’ve assembled similar Google search links to “predict” what the next hundred years might hold in store. The links to those “100 years of prediction” are at the bottom of this post; each year is provided in “with quote” and “without quote” form for convenience. For simpler predictive experimentation, readers can also explore typing 2011, 2035, or other years of interest to see what Google AutoComplete “predicts” the future holds, or the 1-letter search experiment described here.

Somewhat more philosophically, say in light of Inception, The Adjustment Bureau, or other forays into shaping and predicting the future, in what ways, and to what extent can we successfully “predict” the future? Several attempts to “predict” the future do exist, such as: » read more

Government R&D @ Google News

My gift during this holiday season: a feed @ Google News on research and development (R&D) efforts sponsored and/or performed by government agencies. If this experiment goes well, may experiment with creating more feeds related to other facets of information processing in government, industry, and academia.

Update: also created a government R&D feed for SBIR/STTR opportunities.

Enjoy!

Google N-Gram Viewer Word Wave

As any blogger covering data analysis in the government sector might do, here’s yet another “catch the wave” post on the n-gram viewer released by Google Labs on 12/17/2010. The underlying data drawn from the Google Books collection is described in a Science article by Jean-Baptiste Michel and several co-authors. A less rigorous summary has been graciously provided by Google, along with access to the raw datasets. The several thousand compressed zip files appear to each be around 150MB and expand to 1GB; full collection is slowly being posted. Some highlights: » read more