Looking for simple facts on the web can be a frustrating business. Over time, we bookmark sites that reliably deliver the goods – things like basic geographical data, conversion scales for measurements, biographical summaries, or anything else that we need to quickly grab, plug in, and move on. But it all takes much longer than it should, and in looking for such things, we’re plagued as much by the nuance of internet search as by its imprecision. It’s all part of learning how to deal with this massive web we’ve created, and the state of blindness to which it reduces us. Search engines are really the only tool we have for groping through a pitch black sea of information, where the ineluctable modality is meaning, not the visible (for more on this, read Steven Pemberton’s talk from the Decade of Web Design conference, which if:book attended this January in Amsterdam).
Well Google has helped us to see, just a little bit better, the little nuggets and factual crystals that we so often sift for in our blindness – by unveiling a new Q&A feature for basic web search (article via Bibliotheke). Plug in a search like “earth distance sun,” or “copernicus date of death,” and you get exactly what you’re looking for right above the stack of general results:

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It’s the kind of small, thoughtful innovation that makes you appreciate Google’s attention to detail and sensitivity to the problem of blindness. Other search engines like Ask Jeeves offer a similar feature, but Google includes the information’s source (a source they’ve vetted and deemed reliable) and a link to that page. For example, in the case of basic geography and demographics, the link might be to the CIA’s World Factbook. Even if you just grab the fact and run, it’s comforting to have seen a trustworthy citation, though some might grumble about the CIA.
It would be fantastic if this kind of quick fact extraction could be tailored to different search needs. Imagine a “writer’s search toolbox” combining every conceivable reference resource that an author might need. Enter “synonym for think” and right at the top you get an entire thesaurus search result: “analyze, appraise, appreciate, brood, cerebrate, chew, cogitate, comprehend, conceive….” Enter “idiom with humble” and you get “eat humble pie,” “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” etc. Or search for rhymes, poetic forms, grammar guidelines, literary terms, writer bios, quotes, etymologies – anything. It’s good news that search is being refined in this way, and competition among giants seems, in the end, to be good for the average web browser. Whatever helps us spend less time scouring and more time on the things that are important to us.