Chapter 8: Experimenting in Google Labs

---

In This Chapter

• Lending your computer to science with Google Compute

• Watching the Google Viewer

• Reading WebQuotes

• Finding definitions in Google Glossary

• Testing the quirky Google Sets

• Calling up Voice Search

• Using keyboard shortcuts in your search results

Google is a brainy company, and its many PhD employees are always conceiving new ideas. Google itself — the main Web index and search algorithms — was a college experiment turned corporate, in the finest tradition of Internet entrepreneurism. Many of Google’s now-standard features began as tentative experiments that survived testing and arrived on the home page. At this writing, Google News — one of Google’s anchor services — is still a beta product, meaning that it’s still officially in the testing phase. (Seems to work pretty darn well to me. See Chapter 3.)

Some of Google’s newest brainstorms get piled into Google Labs, an open testing area that anyone can play with. You enter this area at your own risk, but honestly, the risk is minimal. In most cases, all that can really go wrong is that something you try won’t work as advertised, and even that is rare. All the Google variants described in this chapter except one operate on Google’s computers, not yours. You interface with them through your browser, just like regular Googling. The exception, Google Compute, is described in the first section.

The Google variants such as Google Viewer (cooler and more useful than it first seems), Google WebQuotes (fun and revealing), and Keyboard Shortcuts (bound to hurt your mouse’s feelings) operate as distinct and autonomous search engines. They hook into the same Google index as the traditional Web search. But you access them from a separate Web page, and their features can’t be integrated into the main Google interfaces on the home page. So, when you want to search the Web using Google Viewer, you go to the Viewer page and conduct your search from there.

This chapter covers everything in Google Labs as of this writing. Some of them have been there for more than a year. Be sure to check the Google Labs page at the following URL from time to time to see if anything’s new:

labs.google.com

---