G infinity

Remember the Animaniacs cartoon duo "Pinky and the Brain"? Brain, the genius rodent, constantly plotted to take over the world...maybe he would like to work for Google, because they seem to be aiming to take over the world [of information]! (Although according to The Invisible Web by Chris Sherman and Gary Price, there are plenty of websites that go "uncrawled" by Google for various reasons.)

Here are other online articles about the "invisible web" (sorta ironic that I found these via Google, eh?):

• "Those Dark Hiding Places" by Robert Lackie
• "Invisible or Deep Web" from the UC-Berkeley library
• Wikipedia's entry on Deep Web.

Anyway, back to the point of this post, which is to describe my explorations of Google Labs products. It's neat that they have so many experimental projects going on...maybe when I'm more tech-savvy, I'd be interested in participating...whoa, that would be even more ironic. ;D

I tried Google Sets (since it was the last one listed, and I have sympathy for Last Things Listed, having a surname toward the end of the alphabet), Google Ride Finder, and Google Page Creator. Even though the last two names are clunky-sounding, I have to say that G--gle is doing a good job of branding these services to make sure everyone knows these innovations are associated with them....

• Google Sets is neat...it tries to detect a pattern out of items you input. I first entered "apple," "mango," "persimmon," "pineapple," and "guava", and then it generated a whole list of fruits! I also did a sorta-library related set of "cataloging," "web," "service," "books," and "maps," which generated mostly appropriate terms, except for "heraldry"--where did that come from?
• Google Ride Finder could be useful for seeing whether a private transit vehicle is nearby to pick you up. However, when I tried to refresh the position of the taxi cars, they didn't budge on the map. This would be more useful if I could see where the King County Metro buses are...I wonder if Google Transit shows this.
• Google Page Creator is just what it says. I'm not so interested in this, although I like the idea of having a website hosted for free.