People who need GooglePeople are the luckiest people in the world.
Sometimes on the Web it’s hard to separate the signal from the noise. It’s also hard to separate information about people from information about everything else. That’s where GooglePeople (http://www.avaquest.com/demos) comes in. GooglePeople takes a “Who Is” or “Who Was” query (e.g., “Who was the first man on the moon?” or “Who was the fifth president of the United States?”) and offers a list of possible candidates. It works well for some questions, but for others it’s way off base.
GooglePeople is simple: enter a “Who Is” or “Who Was” question in the query box. GooglePeople will think about it for a minute or three and provide you with a list of possible candidates to answer your question, with the most likely candidate on top, the other candidates listed underneath and rated for relevance with a series of asterisks.
Click a candidate name for a Google query integrating your original query and the candidate’s name; this provides a quick test of the validity and usefulness of the GooglePeople query at hand.
I found that for some questions GooglePeople worked very well.
Who was the first African American woman in space?
was answered perfectly. But some questions had GooglePeople
perplexed.
GooglePeople seems to have a bit of trouble with identifying the
authors of fiction books. For example, asking Who
is
the
author
of "Galahad
at
Blandings"
, GooglePeople
will not confidently give an answer but will suggest that the most
likely person is Bertie Wooster. Bertie is close, but no cigar;
he’s a fictional character created by the same
author of Galahad at Blandings—P. G.
Wodehouse—but he’s far from an author.
GooglePeople was able to state with confidence that Mark Twain was
the author of Huckleberry Finn.
Sometimes expressing numbers as numbers (1st) rather than words (first) makes a lot of difference in results. Asking GooglePeople about the first person to do something versus the “1st” person to do something can lead to very different results, so be sure to try both versions.