Information Research Weblog

Thanks to Lockergnome for drawing attention to AvaQuest's GooglePeople.

This implementation of Google takes either people's names or questions, such as "Who was the 23rd President of the United States?" and comes up with Google's answers. The site acknowledges that it doesn't do too well on people outside the USA.

The About page tells us that:

GooglePeople uses your question to do a Google search. It then extracts the people names found on the top 10 result pages and chooses the likely answer to your question based on its scoring algorithm.
GooglePeople is a Python application built on top of the Google Web API using Mark Pilgrim's PyGoogle module. The Google Web API makes all sorts of interesting applications possible; see for example GAPS, The Oracle of Google, and Office XP Google Smart Tags.

I tried "Who runs the consultancy company Fernstar?" - and it gave zero replies, instead of "Frank Miller", so I then tried: "Who is Frank Miller?" - and got a comic book artist, and a lumber dealer - but not the guy in Brisbane that readers of Information Research will be familiar with.

However, it did tell me that Alex Ferguson is the manager of Manchester United and even that he is 5ft 7ins and weighs 13st 2lbs!

Obviously it is only as good as your presence on the Web makes it - when I asked "Who is the founder of phenomenology?", Husserl didn't appear on the list but, for some strange reason, Tom Waits did!