Google your life away
February 21, 2003 10:49 AM   Subscribe

GoogObits I have always had a fascination with the obituaries page and dead pools. I have hosted a small dead pool for friends for the past few years and have collected obituaries of famous and sent them out as email salvos to friends. But this is an inspiration to us all. The joy of google, the fascination with the obit. Enjoy the dead.
posted by majikwah (3 comments total)
 
Somebody should write an Obit for this FPP.
posted by smcniven at 12:59 PM on February 21, 2003


That's not very nice, smcniven.

Interesting site. I'm not sure how valuable a Google-annotated obituary is, though, if the annotations have little or nothing to do with the person being eulogized.
Mr. Kreindler was adept at boiling a mass of both legal and factual issues down to their essences.
Not sure how links to why water boils, the state of Massechusetts and lingerie improves an obit for a prominent lawyer.
posted by me3dia at 2:17 PM on February 21, 2003


I was expecting more comments on this thread - not about obituaries but about the idea of generating links automatically from a piece of text. It seems that the GoogObits site uses some script that chooses likely phrases from the text and then links them to their first Google hit. The trouble is that the algorithm for picking phrases is not very clever - they could improve it by only considering phrases of more than one word, preferring uncommon words and looking for sequences of capitalized words.

I've toyed with the idea of automatic links - I think it could have some value but once you reach a certain level it's impossible to reduce false hits without a huge amount of effort.
posted by jamespake at 2:07 PM on February 25, 2003


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