Sunday, August 28, 2011

Google | Google Says Goodbye To Google Sets On Sept. 5

So what, exactly, is Google Sets ? If you haven't heard of it, the premise of the tool is pretty simple. When you navigate over to the official Google Sets page, you're given a list of five blank bullet points. Your task is to fill the boxes with a number of related objects. Google's task is to place these entries into either a large or small set of corresponding objects: Essentially, you're asking the search engine to find the relationship between the items and expand upon it.

Google Sets helped create the technological tone for a similar Google Labs project called Google Squared–one that's also being phased out on September 5, we note. In it, a user types a single category that he or she would like more information about: Cats, for example. The page that Google then delivers contains an automatically generated table of characteristics and modifiers related to the original search term. In our example, a list of cat species fills a column on the left-hand side of the page while images, descriptions, and other selectable traits fill columns to the right.

There has been no mention as to whether the functionality in Google Sets or Google Squared will make its way into other Google applications (including Google's primary search). And, sadly, there's no eulogy or Google Blog write-up to send these two projects off into the sunset. Google's last official post on Google Labs came roughly one month ago when Bill Coughran, senior vice president for research and systems infrastructure, made the official death announcement for the entire project.

"While we've learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we're to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead," Coughran wrote .

For more from David, follow him on Twitter @TheDavidMurphy .

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