Engaging in a Little QA

Engaging in a Little Q&A

Want to settle a bet, answer a question that has been bugging you, or impress someone with the amazing range of your knowledge? Send text messages to Google on almost any topic.

You can get the answers to lots of questions over a very broad array of topics. You can find out who wrote certain books or who invented certain things. There is no guarantee that Google knows the answers. Tests of Q&A revealed huge holes in Google’s ability to answer things. For example, Google knew the inventor of television, but not of radio. Google knew the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, but not the author of any of the Harry Potter books. You can learn things such as the population of cities or countries, the gross domestic product (GDP) of various nations, and all sorts of other trivia (see Figure 29.8).

Figure 29.8: Send text messages to Google to find things such as the GDP of the Netherlands.

Here are some sample queries:

• GDP of Netherlands

• mass of the moon

• author to kill a mockingbird

There is no exact format for creating a Q&A query. Basically, phrase it as what you want to know about a certain topic: question + topic. If Google does not understand your question, you may get a suggestion in return or a message telling you the reason Google can’t answer your question.