Google debuts reputation, slideshow experiments

Labs toys

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 11th December 2002 00:49 GMT

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Two new toys from Google's "technology playground" make their debut today, the first new experiments since Google Labs opened their doors in May.

One, Google Viewer turns your results into a slideshow. Take your hands off the keyboard and allow it to pan across the results. You can speed up or slow down the refresh rate, which defaults to five seconds.

This could make for an amusing alternative to a screensaver if used with those novelty misspellings which feature in NTK.

The second could be much more interesting: an instant reputation service. Google Webquotes "annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites."

Of course gaming Google results is a popular hobby. The Church of Scientology goes to considerable expense to ensure it's the most popular site on Google - but can't stop anti-Scientology information sites coming out at Numbers 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 in the rankings. And it's even been the vehicle for a rather hubristic attempt at blackmail in one our most famous Flames of The Week from "jpzr". (One of my two online stalkers).

It's at the earliest stages of development: a search for "Scott McNealy" turned up two corporate bios from Sun, and eight interviews with McNealy. Neither really contained any third party opinions about the search subject.