March 09, 2004

Google Reads My Mind Again

I recently wrote about the delightful ability of Google Calculator to accept queries in multiple formats. Today I came across a feature that further established my faith in Google. We all know it reigns supreme in everyday search satisfaction but even in rare contingencies, there's no parallel to Google.

I was using Goggle's Deskbar utility for my search and almost all the results turned up from Japanese sites, in characters that show up as tiny rectangles on my system that doesn't recognize the font. Pages after pages of results in Japanese. Just when I was about to quit in frustration, Google read my mind. It asked, if I would you prefer to search for English results only.

Like everyone else, I do tens of searches on Google everyday but I’ve never come across a page where I was inundated with results in a foreign language and wanted to limit them to my language of choice. Yet, Google had anticipated this problem and designed a solution for even this uncommon contingency.

I marvel at such attention to detail.

And I have no idea how many of these little surprises does Google hold in its massive reservoir of delight.