March 16, 2005

Those wacky geniuses at Google are at it again: Google Sets
posted by mecurious 19 years ago
  • I have to say that this, while very cool, has been around for quite a long time.
  • If I remember correctly, they brought out sets about two years ago.
  • I enter ninjas and hoplites, select large set and get back... INSANITY TEST My Vegas Trip Mind Games Get a Gangsta Name Human for Sale com Camel Toes FOB Millionaire hmmm... needs more salt.
  • I'm just waiting for their next April Fool's joke. The pigeon one still gets me every time.
  • John Paul George... Ringo Yeah, it works.
  • If I remember correctly, they brought out sets about two years ago. err... nearly THREE, but who's counting? how did I miss this? You may now resume your regularly scheduled lives.
  • This is new, however: Google Ex /blatantly hijacking thread
  • Good! Now I can track down my ex and give her the crawling I-love-you-baby-please-take-me-back e-mail she so richly deserves, the bitch.
  • pr0n: Frank Miller Fansites, Stuff that offends me, macintosh sites I like eh?
  • This is probably not new, but I hadn't seen it before: Google SMS
  • Yeah, mare. That is way cool. I saved the source of that page (locally) and put in some linebreaks so I could make heads or tails of what they are doing. Of course my local copy wouldn't show the images until I put in a head tag: <base href="http://labs.google.com/googlex/"> But my local doesn't work when I mouseover the images. Not sure why, but then it doesn't take much in the javascript dept. to flummox me.
  • Hey Mare - you even beat googleblog to it. Kudos & nanas! It is most excellent.
  • It doesn't work for the Fibonacci sequence.
  • Haven't seen this before, but I's pleased to know there's now a quick way to get the name of that seventh damn dwarf* which keeps eliding me. *Bashfull
  • = eluding I do not know how I's snuck in there. But I's sorry.
  • Now Googlex is gone! Link also removed from the labs.google.com home page.
  • Google Groups discuss page for Googlex is still there (for now?)
  • For those of us who missed it, could someone please explain what GoogleX is/was? I followed that link to the groups page, but couldn't figure out much... Thanks in advance.
  • Uh, ok... Found this in the discussion group: "Google X is a creative alternative to the home page, allowing users to access more of the Google services (i.e. scholar, video, maps) by a single click and also making it fun in the process. Just roll your mouse pointer over the icons and see the icons dance!" I guess that gives a little idea. Too bad they closed it off. I'm curious to see what it actually looked like. Anyone get any screenshots?
  • I'm trying the Google SMS with my T-Mobile cell phone in the US. It doesn't seem to be working. Anyone else on T-Mobile in the US try this and have any luck?
  • The "X" is I believe a reference to the OS X interface. When you mouse over the icons, they grow larger. Don't have a screenshot, but that's what the Google site looked like too. Instead of text link to images/groups/whatever, it had the little pop-up icons. And more links on the front page than on Google's standard search page.
  • I thought it was rather odd when I first looked at the googlex page this morning. Makes me wonder if Apple didn't step in and make some noise regarding the similarity of OS X dock and the googlex thing?? There was even some text at the bottom of the googlex page, which had a direct link to Apple's OS X page, which said "Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, OS X Rocks! An homage to You" Perhaps Apple noticed an upswing in hits to its page, and took notice of the "googlex dock??"
  • PigAlien, it worked for me this morning and I have T-Mo. It took a little while for the response to come back, though.
  • That Google Groups link yielded this backup of GoogleX. I like.
  • the sms thing is awesome. i use it regularly. prices: "F [item number or name]" (f is for froogle) dinner: "pizza 11768" definitions: "D frenetic" I'm on sprint, so I can't speak for it working for t-mobile. They do warn you that it might not work if you had your number transferred, I think.
  • Thanks, Proteus Moteus, missed that! Looks swell.
  • I typed in the palindromic form of google (googlelgoog) to see what would pop up. Nothing I can understand, as it turns out.
  • "Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, OS X Rocks! An homage to You" This is better than the OS X dock! One of my biggest peeves about dock zooming (and the reason everyone I know has it turned off) is that the icons move as they're scaled, making the click target no larger than it was for the small icon. Googlex does it right. They zoom an icon once, and keep it stationary, and large until the user moves to the next icon which then zooms and takes up the space the other leaves as it shrinks. Big click targets, but unobtrusive icons. Nice job Google.
  • The links keep disappearing, but here is another copy of Googlex: http://www.thejosher.com/googlex/. Finally got myself a local copy to study.
  • To easily get the large icons with the small ones when saving GoogleX locally I found a zip file. I tried to look at the source to locate them when I realized I don't know javascript.
  • Trying to deconstruct the Googlex page and found something interesting. Under the Google logo is a single-cell table that contains the imageTitle. I noticed in the source code that there was the word "Labs" pushed to the right by a 280px-wide single pixel GIF. Couldn't see it on the page and noticed that the text is styled WHITE by the div. When you roll over it, the text goes from white (invisible on the white bkgnd) to black. When you roll off, it goes back to white. If you change the bgcolor in that table to medium grey (#999999) you'll see both color states. Now here is the part I haven't figured out yet. The other imageTitles have to do the same thing for the other text titles and they have to change the width of the single pixel GIF that determines where the text shows up (pushing it so many pixels to the right). Also, is it my imagination, or when the imageTitles appear - don't they seem to sort of FADE into existence rather than just blink on? This may be the LEAST impressive thing that the page does, but I guess it is a revelation to me, since I'm not a DHTML/javascript guy.
  • C|net story on the disappearing Googlex