Saturday, February 12, 2005

GPS for the unknown

We all in research community know , and wonder how people actually did any work before google. I know its an exaggeration and may be my love for google is speaking here..
But to give you an example heres, what I found at Dictionary.com :
Google :
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: to search for information about a specific person through the Google search engine
Example: She googled her high school boyfriends.

Google has entered english language jargon as a verb, to be used as synonym to verb search.

To add to my fascination, now google has bunch of new services available to ease our life even more. There is so called, scholar.google.com. Its a matter of pride to type ones name here, (well if ur new to research anyways) and get list of papers (published) ranked in order of number of citations it has received and many a times direct link to the papers online version from the publishers site. The matter of ease with which one can now do search for the journal articles is amazing. One only has to know first few words of the title or the author and the context and more often than not, google will find the article one is looking for. No wonder, this google service is aptly described "Stand on the shoulders of giants".

The next amazing service is local.google.com.
I am in the mood to eat, etheopian cuisine today and wonder where the nearest Etheopian restaurant is located. Comes in local google. All one does is type in Etheopian Restaurant, and your postal code, up comes the nearest restaurant offering ehteopian cuisine with detailed address of the place. Till like few days ago, one had to take the address, go to mapquest and get driving direction to the desired location. Google has now minimized that effort for you even.

Last week, google released the latest service on their menu. maps.google.com. This is where the title of this entry comes in. Try some search on this new service offered by google. It has insanely close resemblance to GPS navigation system, we are so used to see on those, sci flicks. One types in any address, and pops up the location on a map, zoomed in close up to the place. Then the browser prompts the user to answer whether is it the start or destination address and appropriately pops up a window to type in the requisite address. Say I type in my start and destination address, and la behold u have the shortest route, connecting the two points.

It reminds me of the famous travelling sales man problem and I wonder if I type in multiple destination, what output the page produces. I wonder whether is there some cool genetic algorithm running in the back end, trying to optimize on the shortest route. And infact I wouldnt be have ikling of surprise if that is so.

Neways, as I always say, "Discovery is stuff not found on Google."

6 comments:

Without_Borders said...

I share your appreciation for google and it is a wonder how the world functioned without it! Thanks for writing about this.

Parth said...

Ya, I don't find their other services like froogle that useful. Their search though is pretty good. But other search engines like MSN, will eventually expand the space with newer ideas and added services to eventually catch up. Still, I admire the company.

Anonymous said...

http://www.broom.org/epic/

Sachin said...

awesome page man..
are we really heading in that direction ???

Avinash said...

Sachin,. the link I was waiting for was the one posted by Satya. Cool na? And I wouldnt be surprised if we do head in that direction.

Anonymous said...

Millennium Plus operates using an innovative hybrid of technologies, including GPS satellites and patented microburst cell technology. Each time you communicate with the transceiver in the vehicle, there is a two way flow of information.

* When accessing Millennium Plus via the Internet using any standard browser, you send out a signal. That signal then travels to the cell phone tower nearest your current location.

* Microburst technology operates on existing cellular networks to send and receive data packets, tapping into unused channels on the back side of standard cell frequencies.

* The GPS satellites then locate and communicate with the Millennium Plus transceiver on board your vehicle, which exchanges information on location and speed, as well as executing any commands you've sent.

* The cell towers then relay the signal back to you via the exact means by which it was sent.

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