New Google Toys
December 11, 2002 12:38 AM   Subscribe

New Toys from Google Labs. The Viewer is a slide show of your search results. Google WebQuotes provides third party opinion on your search results. Which one would you find useful?
posted by tboz (13 comments total)
 
The viewer seems silly to me, but maybe with a faster (than DSL) connection it would be useful.

WebQuotes is excellent, I think it should be an option for the main Google search. It does a good job of finding descriptions from other sites, which inevitably describe the site better than its own summary.
posted by mmoncur at 12:46 AM on December 11, 2002


Enter "George W. Bush" in the WebQuotes engine and see why it needs some more development.
posted by thijsk at 1:15 AM on December 11, 2002


rofl.

George W. » Bitches! You and you bitchass friends need to stop this sh#* before I send my boys to shut down your site. This is not why I send your ass to school in Long Island so you can pick on white people.

George W. » Of course your ass is fine, your tits are BIG, but thats no reason to pick on other ppl.

Not to mention a link to the fine website,Bush or Chimp?
posted by cinderful at 1:18 AM on December 11, 2002


I don't understand what problem the Viewer is trying to solve. Hands-free search result browsing? Can't say its something I've been yearning for. Tabbed browsers like Mozilla are a better (although not yet perfect) way to look at and collate results, post-search. Something like this might be of use as an accessibility application for mobility-impared people, perhaps?

Agree that making WebQuotes a results option is a fine idea, though, assuming they can tune it not to return obvious drivel.
posted by normy at 3:16 AM on December 11, 2002


Webquotes wins hands down. Agree with normy, I don't understand the purpose of the Viewer, strikes me as a technological trick that someone made because they could.
posted by jeremias at 4:39 AM on December 11, 2002


I can see how the viewer might be useful if you were trying to recognize a site you know you've seen before but can't remember the URL, but I wouldn't use it as a default. And the scroll method is torturous - I'd prefer it to change all at once, like a real slide show.

The quotes thing is a capital idea so long as it doesn't get corrupted into a list of commerce sites hocking their wares. If it can remain "pure," it will be terrific.
posted by boomchicka at 4:44 AM on December 11, 2002


don't discount the viewer, gang! what if you remembered the general look of a site and some of what it was about but you couldn't recall the title, url, etc?
posted by mcsweetie at 9:48 AM on December 11, 2002


The concept behind Search Shots is better than the Google Viewer but in practice, it leaves a little something to be desired.
posted by Jaybo at 10:16 AM on December 11, 2002


Can't say its something I've been yearning for.

No, me either, but it's kind of fun to leave rolling while you're on the phone or something. I read somewhere someone mention it makes a nice screen-saver replacement (oh yeah, the.reg) if you have a constant connection.

Been trying it out, it's pretty slow and buggy on a modem though.
posted by lucien at 10:38 AM on December 11, 2002


I haven't been yearning for this Viewer app, but now that I've tried it (once), I think it might be useful. It's a different way of mentally filtering search results. I do have a high speed connection, so maybe I'm biased.
posted by AaronO at 11:12 AM on December 11, 2002


Love the keyboard shortcuts! Yeah!
posted by DenOfSizer at 11:19 AM on December 11, 2002


Hmm, tried webquotes on dragonball and got lots of pop-ups.

Looks like they haven't filtered out "meta http-equiv="refresh"" from the description strings.
posted by bobo123 at 11:21 AM on December 11, 2002


Which one would you find useful?

Um, neither?
posted by valerie at 3:37 PM on December 12, 2002


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