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Guess-the-google

Image-searching engines have an oddly philosophical quality to them. The searches are always a little imprecise, because they hunt for pictures not via actual content of the images — Google and Yahoo and Flickr’s engines cannot actually “see” what’s in the picture — but via the keywords associated with the picture, such as the words the webmaster used when they put the pic online.

The upshot is that when you pump a word like “lazy” into an image-searching engine, the results are kind of like a tone-poem of ontology — a drifting set of vaguely-connected pictures, each one illustrating some facet of the word’s meaning. In Flickr, “lazy” gives you pictures of sleeping cats, dogs, and, weirdly, some line-art of a face. Over at Google Images, however, “lazy” produces a shot of Homer Simpson crashed out on a couch, some polar bears — but also the perennial sleeping cats, which seems to be the Jungian archetype for laziness. I’ve often spent several minutes paging through the results of a particular search, fascinated by the various things people think a word “looks like”.

Now Grant Robinson has reversed these propositions in a great little online game called Guess the google. It pumps a word into Google Images, gathers 20 pictures from the results, presents these you in a 5-by-4 grid — and you have to guess what was the original word. It’s time-limited, so the faster you guess the higher your score is.

Robinson’s a brilliant designer. While you’re at his site, check out his iteration of John Conway’s Game of Life — one of the prettiest versions I’ve ever seen!


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

The “Milky Way Transit Authority” map

Should automobile software be open-sourced?

My Bookforum review of Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”

Molecular secrets of the “iron-plated snail”

Garry Kasparov, cyborg

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a bunch of stuff

January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are al­ready dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a mis­ery, then, be­cause an evil?
A. Cer­tain­ly.
M. Then those who have al­ready died, and those who have still got to die, are both mis­er­able?
A. So it ap­pears to me.
M. Then all are mis­er­able?
A. Ev­ery one.

January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM

One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

)

January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

January 11, 2010 » 01:45 PM

I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson