adrian holovaty

October 26, 2002, 11:00 PM ET

Searching for the 5 W's

Googlism uses Google to give you one-sentence answers on "who," "what," "where" or "when" a particular term is.

Most of it is silly. For example, a "who" search for "Paul McCartney" results in a wacky list of descriptions ranging from "paul mccartney is a great musician" to "paul mccartney is a futile gesture." Whatever that means.

But some of it is dead-on. For example, a "who" search for my name returns this single result:

adrian holovaty is assistant database editor and product developer at the atlanta journal

Not bad at all -- especially for something created just to be a "fun tool."

I mention this site (which I heard about via Simon Willison) because I think this technology, when improved, would be an intuitive way to get news. It'd be great to be able to do, say, a "who" search for "Alan Greenspan" or a "what" search for "World Series," and get a results page with meaningful content instead of a laundry list of article links.

For the "Alan Greenspan" search, perhaps the result page would give a short biography of Mr. Greenspan, plus a short summary of how he has been in the news lately. (With links to more detailed stories, of course.)

For the "World Series" search, perhaps you'd get a synopsis of the baseball series so far, with historical information and, again, links to more in-depth content.

The questions that Googlism lets you pose, and the questions that news stories address, are a natural fit. Journalists in the audience will note "who," "what," "where" and "when" are four of the somewhat cliché five W's and one H -- the questions that effective news stories should answer. (The remaining two questions are "why" and "how," but those are beyond the scope of a simple text-search engine, for now.)