What does Google think of you, your friends, your neighborhood, or your favorite movie?
If you’ve ever wondered what people think of your home town, your favorite band, your favorite snack food, or even you, Googlism (http://www.googlism.com/) may provide you something useful.
The interface is dirt simple. Enter your query and check the appropriate radio button to specify whether you’re looking for a who, a what, a where, or a when. You can also use the tabs to see what other objects people are searching for and what searched-for objects are the most popular. A word of warning: some of these are not work-safe.
Googlism will respond with a list of things Google believes about the
query at hand, be it a person, place, thing, or moment in time. For
example, a search for Perl
and
“What” returns, along with a
laundry list of others:
Perl is a fairly straightforward Perl is aesthetically pleasing Perl is just plain fun
Among the more humorous results for Steve Jobs
and
“Who” are:
steve jobs is my new idol steve jobs is at it again steve jobs is apple's focus group
To figure out what page any particular statement comes from, simply copy and paste it into a plain old Google search. That last statement, for instance, came from an article titled “Innovation: How Apple does it” at http://www.gulker.com/ra/appleinnovation.html.
For the most part this is a party hack—a good party hack. Its a fun way to aggregate related statements into a silly (and occasionally profound) list.
But that’s just for the most part. Googlism also
works as a handy ready-reference application, allowing you to quickly
find answers to simple or simply-asked questions. Just ask them of
Googlism in a way that can end with the word is. For example, to
discover the capital of Virginia enter The capital
of
Virginia
. To learn why the
sky is blue try The
reason
the
sky
is blue
. Sometimes this doesn’t work very
well; try the
oldest
person
in
the world
and you’ll immediately be confronted
with a variety of contradictory information. You’d
have to visit each page represented by a result and see which answer,
if any, best suited your research needs.
This application is a lot of fun, but it could be expanded. The trick is to determine how web page creators generate statements.
For example, when initially describing an acronym, many writers use
the words “stands for.” So you
could add a Googlism that searches for your keyword and the phrase
“stands for.” Do a Google search
for "SETI
stands
for"
and "DDR
stands
for"
and
you’ll see what I mean.
When referring to animals, plants, and even stones, the phrase
“are found” is often used, so you
could add a Googlism that located things. Do a Google search for
sapphires
are
found
and jaguars
are
found
and see what you
find.
See if you can think of any phrases that are in common usage, and then check those phrases in Google too see how many results each phrase has. You might get some ideas for a topic-specific Googlism tool yourself.