Fun with Google Suggest and what it tells us about how people behave online
One of my favorite blogs these days is Autocomplete Me, an often hilarious site that catalogues funny and bizarre Google suggest queries.
Some of the suggestions that pop up are really baffling. For example, why are people asking “what do you feed a yeti anyway“? Why would someone search for “my nipples smell like sauerkraut“?
As Clive Thompson notes, many of these search queries are actually obscure cultural references. They might be a line from a movie or song, or an internet meme.
However, what’s interesting to me is what the stream-of-consciousness nature of these queries suggests about how we have begun to understand and use Google (and by extension, the internet). I find it fascinating that the internet is the first point of contact for so many people for any question or observation, and that we have become completely comfortable just typing things in (and anything goes) to see what sticks. It will be interesting to see how this tendency progresses as our technology gets even more sophisticated.
Google hits vanity ring
Google Hits Vanity Ring – this is on my Christmas list!
Birthday: Google is 10 Years Old
I heart Google.
Yahoo! News via Lifehacker
iGoogle: The Most Productive Gadgets
Google Stalker
So the blogosphere (wow, can’t believe I actually just used that word) has been abuzz with Google’s newStreet View component to the already excellent Google Maps. The first thing that struck me when I played around with the feature — well, actually the second thing, right after “damn, that’s cool” — was that the stalker factor on this feature was kinda high. I mean, Google has always been the best friend of the nosy and invasive, but taking pictures of someone’s apartment building? Cree-eeepy.
It seems I’m not the only one to feel this way.
Tracking personal inventory — Google Spreadsheets and Lazybase
Being gloriously in between jobs at the moment, I decided to undertake a personal project that I’ve been postponing for just about forever — a spring cleaning of my wardrobe, in which I will dutifully discard the stained, the ill-fitting, and “what was I thinking” items lurking in my closet. However, such fashion-forward intentions were quickly stifled by an innate geekiness, as I used the project as an excuse to try out two very Web 2.0 tools — Google Spreadsheets
and Lazybase.
Besides starting out with what was quite possibly the most uncool approach to fashion ever, I also formed some opinions on the tools in question (I also ended up with a large pile of clothes on my bed, a half-eaten bag of chocolate chips, and the conviction that I should work out more often).
Google
Spreadsheets — looks pretty good, works mostly as
advertised. They could use some work on the toolbars and menus (some commands are in odd places, and perhaps it’s years of working with Microsoft but I really don’t think that the formula bar should be hidden as a default), and keyboard shortcuts don’t work quite as smoothly as I’d like (of course, given the fact that it is implemented in a browser, it’s hard to be too picky about CTRL and ALT chords). I have yet to totally convinced that the web can replace certain desktop applications due to complications like these, so to me this mostly seems like a technological proof of concept, the “we can do it on the web too” statement to throw in the face of developers who don’t really get web technologies (not that that’s a bad thing). I think the overall spreadsheet concept will probably make a lot of sense within the context of certain web-based applications (I’m working on one now that could use something like it), but not as much as its own stand-alone system. Web-based word processing tools, like Writeboard and Writely, really work best
when they’re folded into a greater context, like Basecamp.
Lazybase — okay, Lazybase, I expect more from you. Such a great idea, such a functional implementation — it wouldn’t take much more to make me fall in love. Lazybase is only missing the sexy. I want Flickr integration. I want inline image display in the list view. I want column re-ordering. I want item and type copying. I want XML exports. You’ve got Google Maps integration, but so does everybody and their mom. I want to set default values for new items. I want to create predefined lists. I want better documentation and a slightly less minimal UI so that I can actually find these features. I want Next and Previous buttons when I’m editing items. I want batch changes. I know this sounds really picky, but it’s only because Lazybase is just so close. Somebody get this guy a budget so he can continue to do good work.
