Google Search Finally Adds Information About Video Games 47
An anonymous reader writes Google has expanded its search engine with the capability to recognize video games. If your query references a game, a new Knowledge Graph panel on the right-hand side of Google's search results page will offer more information, including the series it belongs to, initial release date, supported platforms, developers, publishers, designers, and even review scores. Google spokesperson: "With today's update, you can ask questions about video games, and (while there will be ones we don't cover) you'll get answers for console and PC games as well as the most popular mobile apps."
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What's a viable option for quality results still? Perhaps if enough people used DuckDuckGo there search would actually become useful
I don't like (Score:3)
the current trend of google to create a "smart search" that directly answers your questions. Not because this isn't useful, but because projects like wikipedia suffer from it. This is even a direct competitor to wikidata. I still don't understand why wikidata isn't copyleft, its a bad descision in my eyes. Or isn't there any copyright on databases? Then i'll look forward for open google scraping projects.
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The wikidata page is similarly stamped:
"All structured data from the main and property namespace is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; text in the other namespaces is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.", which links to http://creativecommons.org/pub... [creativecommons.org] and the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
And CC0 is no copyleft license. "text in the other namespaces" is only a small minority of wikidata's data.
So, there you go. WP doesn't suffer. The appearance of Wikipedia data in Google's Knowledge Panels furthers WP's goals.
Now google decides what appears in the info box. Also, the image is chosen by google, and all other data than the short description also come from some google database. So while wikipedia is still prominent, its position is weakened.
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No, there are plenty of articles that ought to be deleted. Wikipedia should be punished for allowing organized special interest groups to take near total control over articles to push their own agendas.
Re:I don't like (Score:4, Informative)
'Smart search' is great for questions like "Who won the World Series in 1987" or "How many Grand Theft Auto games are there". It's not so great for "What is the plot of GTA V".
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I like it, and even used it yesterday.
I couldn't remember our externally facing IP address. The security guy was on lunch. So I went and searched for "What is my IP?" and dreaded eventually ending up at one of those spam laden, ad riddled websites designed for that survive. To my pleasant surprise, Google just offered it up for me. I could still click on the awful links bellow if I wanted all the nonsense.
This is good, and all is well with the word.
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Wikipedia is dead, for anything other than keeping track of trivia about popular media anyway. All the policies about removing content in the name of improving quality, without adding proper quality processes on top, killed it around 2007 - not coincidentally, that's where the decline of editors started.
The huge knowledge base that is Wikipedia is merely waiting for someone to successfully fork it; it may very well be Google graph, as they're the best positioned.
The first company that manages to define a pr
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The data in the panel IS from Wiki data. Nearly all of the information in all of Googles side panels is coming from Wikipedia. They link directly to it.
Improved Search doesn't hurt Wikipedia (Score:2)
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How does Wikipedia suffer? If Google knows the answer, nobody will hit Wikipedia's servers and thus Wikipedia won't have to beg for as much cash in December. If Google doesn't, Wikipedia will be the stop result as always.
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And if google knows the answer, nobody cares what is on wikipedia. Therefore articles become inaccurate, which give Wikipedia a bad name. So no direct harm, yes, but a very strong indirect harm.
results rather lame (Score:1)
Did a test search for "Metroid" and it pops up a box with a list of games that does not include either Metroid or Super Metroid. It seems to have nothing older than about 2002.
Re:results rather lame (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you mention it, if you search for "Doom", you get (amongst others):
Doom (Video game)
Developers: GT Interactive Software
Designers: Tom Hall, Shawn Green, John Romero
Doom (Video game)
Developer: id Software
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
So I guess John Carmack never did exist.
And, yes, "Doom (Video game)" appears twice. The second one is actually "Doom 4."
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I get this when I search for "doom":
Designers: Tom Hall, Shawn Green, John Romero, Sandy Petersen, American McGee
Still no Johnny Cee there. They must add a "Programmers" section!
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None of the mods remember the ubiquitous "Winners don't use drugs" [wikipedia.org] message from the later arcade days?
The site ahead contains malware (Score:2)
As for a guesstimate from the headline/summary, I generally like "smart search", I'd love to see Google apply Watson-style technology to return relevant answers.
We still have video games? (Score:1, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Why do we need new games? Everyone knows Quake 3 attained perfection in 1999. It's a scientific fact.
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Thank god for 3M for releasing that patch, though.
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Why do we need new games? Everyone knows Quake 3 attained perfection in 1999. It's a scientific fact.
Heh!
But hey, 1999 was a great year. CPUs and 3D accelerators were powerful enough to run games like Quake 3 or Half-Life. All games released after that has just been about adding more fidelity.
Sound quality of music albums reached also a pinnacle point: we got great digital audio workstations with lots of tracks and good signal-to-noise ratio, and the dynamic range compression madness had not yet begun.
Windows 2000 was released, which is the other of the two non-sucky graphical operating systems Microsoft h
Slidebox Bob (Score:4, Informative)
Google didn't do this to make the gamers happy. They did it to make the non gamers happy, because video game culture is ladden with a rich and repurposed vocabulary that constantly shows up when people don't want to see video games in their search results.
They have to recognize games in order to remove games. Once they've gone that far, throwing up a positive infobox is Slidebox Bob.
"Finally" (Score:1)
Tough market (Score:2)
They're really trying against the big one here this time. How do they plan to trump TPB?
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Turbo Pascal from Borland? What about it?
ring king (Score:2)
Searched for the NES game "Ring King", examined the star ratings, but they were Rom sites and X-rated Newgrounds parodies instead of actual review sites.
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The Monkey Island series shows up in the sidebar for me, and the first two links refer are to the wikipedia pages for the first game and the series in general.
The third link is to that monkey island indoor playground in Chicago.