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by jawns 4121 days ago
I was one of the (apparently few) people who used Google Sets a lot. Even though its results were often hit-or-miss, there were enough hits for it to be a valuable resource.

And unfortunately, I don't know of any comparable alternative. (But please tell me if you do!)

Here is the problem it solved:

It let you discover members of a set by entering a few members that you already know.

For instance, if you enter "terrier," "bulldog," "German shepherd," it might return, "beagle," "poodle," "chihuahua."

Obviously, in this example, it would probably be just as easy to Google "list dog breeds."

But what if you know a few members of a set ... but don't actually know what the set is, or the proper way to describe the set to a search engine?

Or what if the search engine results take you to pages that list some related terms, but you've got to sift through a lot of other content to get to them?

That's when Google Sets really came in handy.

Edit: I admit, Google has gotten a lot better in recent years at returning this sort of information in search results. And Wolfram does a good job, too. So my need for Sets has decreased, but I still miss it.

2 comments

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/11/google-sets-still-a...

It's part of their spreadhseet now. You type things out and drag the items, like you would numbers to count.

I too missed sets a lot and was very happy to have found that:)

This no longer works, unfortunately.
:( I haven't tried it in a while, so :(
What were some real-world situations where you used Google Sets? It always seemed to me like a cool toy without much practical use, and certainly not the most worthy sink of a good engineer's limited time.
Oh, was that E_NOTIMPL, E_NOT_IMPLEMENTED, E_NOIMPL...? I forgot again. Google sets to the rescue! S_OK, E_FAIL, submit. I did that particular one at least 20 times.

I worry that a truly great technology has died with Sets: the way it would correctly intuit the scope of your set. Give it cities in Ohio, it spits out other Ohio cities. But give it London and Tokyo and you get all the major metropolises across the globe. Kudos to those who made it, and I hope they can do it again when applications for it arise.

It's been a few years, so my memory is kind of hazy, but I seem to remember using it for things like:

* I'm trying to remember the acronym of the professional sports league associated with U.S. soccer. I enter: NHL, NBA, NFL.

* I need to think of some consumer brands. I enter: Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson.

* I'm trying to brainstorm female baby names based on Old Testament characters. I enter: Eve, Ruth, Naomi, Esther.

Finding similar/competing projects/products.
Naming servers. Doesn't matter if you use colors, or star trek characters, or nautical terms: plug the existing servers into a set and get a couple new name suggestions.
This was my only valid use for sets too, I can kind of see why it wasn't a project worth serious time maintaining. I always thought it would eventually be integrated into Google Proper via a comma separated syntax or something.

This is my current goto for naming duties:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

That doesn't work if you plug them into regular web search?
Have you tried googling for "kirk spock"? You don't get a list of other star trek characters.
Searching for "list of star trek characters" will give you a comprehensive result on Wikipedia though. As would many similar searches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_characters

I didn't say it's not possible to find a list of characters. Wikipedia has a list page for everything. But the specific claim was that one could plug set elements into a regular search to find more set elements.