Comments on: There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium

Mitheral — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:42:46 -0800

Tom Lehrer's "Elements Song" accompanying Google Instant Search [SLYT].

By: nonreflectiveobject

nonreflectiveobject — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:47:23 -0800

Well, that was fun.

By: cavalier

cavalier — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:54:11 -0800

My lizard brain still can't wrap its head around how Google is managing to swap out that much data so quickly. Thumbnails, text, fine, I don't care if the video is sped up -- querying for ninjas^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsausages^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hperdition^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hducks should not give me four completely usable results with image thumbnails in the time it takes to type those words. And I'm a fast typist. *shakes cane*

By: Slack-a-gogo

Slack-a-gogo — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:54:24 -0800

Well that just killed OK Go's next viral video gimmick.

By: newfers

newfers — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:03:04 -0800

cripes.

By: lauratheexplorer

lauratheexplorer — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:04:40 -0800

"Colbert saves world from Polka Pirates."

By: seanyboy

seanyboy — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:06:12 -0800

Amazing.

By: auto-correct

auto-correct — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:06:37 -0800

This was a good thing.

By: The Winsome Parker Lewis

The Winsome Parker Lewis — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:08:10 -0800

So far I'm not a fan of Instant. I feel like it's rushing me to look at the results and click something before I've finished typing my carefully thought-out query. Why would I want to see the stuff it's throwing at me before I finish adding all the modifiers? It's not going to be what I want. On a more visceral level, I hate that clicking the "search" button doesn't seem to do anything now. Finally, they removed the second search form from results pages, the one at the bottom. That was very handy because, often, after scrolling through a page of links and finding nothing, I could quickly modify my keywords and try again without scrolling back up first. Okay, rant over. I'll get used to this thing, just like I always do.

By: Fraxas

Fraxas — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:08:32 -0800

(google's speed) cf. Technology, sufficiently advanced.

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:23:17 -0800

My lizard brain still can't wrap its head around how Google is managing to swap out that much data so quickly. Looks like it's about 40-60K coming back with each keypress, but that's gzipped so it;s considerably smaller than that. There seems to be some plain text in the data returned, but some other stuff as well that just looks like gobbledegook to me. Being the search behhemoth they are I suspect there's all kinds of caching wizardry they do on the server side too.

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:34:36 -0800

That was cool, but was a bit muted by the smallness of the screen in the frame.

By: iamkimiam

iamkimiam — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:39:38 -0800

Whee!

By: jedicus

jedicus — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:43:00 -0800

Being the search behhemoth they are I suspect there's all kinds of caching wizardry they do on the server side too. Yeah, I'm sure Google is caching the results of popular searches. There are limits, though. Instant doesn't work at all with certain search operators, for example. Try typing in site:metafilter.com Foo. Or filetype:pdf Foo. You'll get nothing with instant. It also stops giving instant feedback after the search string gets beyond a certain length, although the limit is pretty high.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:06:54 -0800

After watching that, YouTube recommended I watch the Google Wave developer preview video. Oh well.

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:18:29 -0800

fun!

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:23:57 -0800

Also it seems like if you type *very quickly* it looks like there is not a 1 to 1 relationship between keystrokes and AJAX calls, particularly at the start. I'm still looking into this, but it's a little hard because you have to type pretty darn fast to notice anything.

By: The Great Big Mulp

The Great Big Mulp — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:29:50 -0800

I saw a tiny bit of Harvey in there. Thus, I approve.

By: oneswellfoop

oneswellfoop — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:52:54 -0800

I've heard that song a million times and I still can't make myself believe there are elements named thulium and thallium. Even after seeing them show up on this video, they are still just too silly to exist! (Sillium?) Does that make me a Science denialist?

By: StickyCarpet

StickyCarpet — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:04:11 -0800

Roentgenium (which is not in this spell-checker) was originally called Unununium. I hate that element. Group 11 was perfect with just copper, silver and gold. There should be a special fantasy league atomic chart for these fleeting, unstable, man-made conjectures.

By: bondcliff

bondcliff — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:35:06 -0800

That's really neat. I wonder what would happen if you did that with 88 Lines about 44 Women and kept Safesearch off.

By: jfuller

jfuller — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:44:45 -0800

> Why would I want to see the stuff it's throwing at me before I finish adding all the modifiers? I almost always have a text editor of some kind open. From now on I just type the search string into the editor and copypaste it to the Goobers browser page. Zoom ahead of that, Speedy Gonzales.

By: Jimmy Havok

Jimmy Havok — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:30:53 -0800

Wow...first time I used Instant, and "i must not t" gave me "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" with a link to a sound file. It's almost eerie.

By: RobotVoodooPower

RobotVoodooPower — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:10:42 -0800

querying for ninjas When you realize Google has an entire server dedicated to ninja queries, it kinda makes sense.

By: librarianamy

librarianamy — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:12:40 -0800

I just threw my hands in the air and shouted "Oh my god that's genius!" Thank you for sharing. Genius.

By: cavalier

cavalier — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:14:19 -0800

Zoom ahead of that, Speedy Gonzales. Click 'Instant Searching is On' to the right of the Search Button -- you can turn it off. :)

By: Legomancer

Legomancer — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:47:01 -0800

chromium radium nickel iridium gold and actinium arsenic plutonium neon molybdenum zinc iodine braving the elements, the reptiles and i

By: jfuller

jfuller — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:19:51 -0800

> Click 'Instant Searching is On' to the right of the Search Button -- you can turn it off. :) > posted by cavalier at 9:14 PM on September 9 [+] [!] But I like torturing machines. My dad had one of the very last Marchant mechanical calculators, like the Difference Engine but with a motor. It was willing to try to divide by zero. Ask it to work out [something] / 0, it would sit there and spin all afternoon until you had mercy and cancelled. Anybody know what's the length limit of the string you can paste into Goober's "exact phrase" field?

By: lore

lore — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:10:41 -0800

I wonder what people searching for "cocker spaniels" see.

By: Mitheral

Mitheral — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:16:43 -0800

Cocker Spaniel is the I'm Feeling Lucky once you get to "Cocke". The first hits before that are for Craigslist, Costco, CocaCola, and Cocktail Dresses.

By: Ahab

Ahab — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 22:02:20 -0800

That's neat. Thanks!

By: DanCall

DanCall — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 01:42:06 -0800

Can someone do this for It's The End of The World as We Know it? Please?

By: partywithoutboundaries

partywithoutboundaries — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 07:25:23 -0800

This is cool. My immediate reactions to Google Instant being sprung on me in Google's place: "WTF TRACERS? But I've never done acid!" then "Wait, how did get to be April 1st already?"

By: Artw

Artw — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 09:49:00 -0800

Charlie Brooker: Google Instant is trying to kill me