Google Hacks

Without doubt, Google is the most useful website on the Internet. This is scary, considering that Google is a company and that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It would be far preferable if some kind of open source search enginesolution could be come up with.
But the truth is, we don't have such a solution and as long as we don't, we might as well have some fun with Google. The projects listed below are Google Hacks in that they use Google for something fun or
interesting in a way that Google was not designed for. Google stimulates these projects in a limited way. The Google
APIallows programmers to do up to a 1000 searches a day from their own projects. Pretty neat, except for that a 1000 is not that much when a service becomes public, especially since some hacks below use more than one search per operation.
So, in order to use some of the hacks below, you'll need your own Google key. You can get it at Googlefor free and you'll need it at other sites with Google hacks too.

Poetry in Translation
Poetry in Translation uses Googles Automatic Translation service to translate sentences from English to German, then to French and then back to German again with sometimes funny results. [go there]

Google Talk
Ever wondered what Google would say if it could talk? Wonder no more. Enter three or four words and Google will finish your thoughts by searching for what comes next after these words. [go there]

Visual Poetry
Poetry is supposed to project images in your mind. VisualPoetry translates any text into a series of images by looking up the words on Google image search and projecting the most relevant results as a slide show. [go there]

Word Color
Word Color is a windows program that uses Google Image Search to determine the color of a word or string of words. It goes out there, retrieves the top 9 images and loops through all pixels, calculating the verage hue, which is later converted to a color. [go there]

Google News Map
Google News Map shows a map of the World with on top of it projected the latest headlines according to Google News, pointing with their upper left corner to the country where it refers to. [go there]

Google Date
Google Date lets you enter a date and then searches using Google for what happened on that date and shows three results. Since Google isn't very good at sorting documents for relevance when it comes to dates, it usually doesn't give you a list of big events, but of the things happening in the lives of random people. [go there]

Google Random Image
Google Random Image is a little javascript code that scans the html of the page it is on and uses that to find a matching image on Google Image Search, which is then displayed. This way you can always have a fresh image on your site/blog. [go there]

Land Geist
Land Geist is a combination of Googles Zeit Geist, Google Mind Shareand Visited Countries. For keywords like 'war', 'poverty', 'party', this project shows which country (names) have the highest relative scores (google shares). I.e. 35% of all pages with the word Iraq on them, also contain the word War, making Iraq leader for war, just after Afghanistan and North-Korea. The axis of evil appear therefore in red. [go there]

Google Share
Implementation of Google Share, as come up with by Steven Berlin Johnson. Type a domain (ie. Beatles), and some Items (John, Paul, Ringo, George) and you get a list of their relative popularity within that omain. [go there]

Google History
Artificial Intelligence with a little help from our friend google. Use Google to find out in what year something happened. Workds for events between 1800 and now. [go there]

Google Battle
Use Google to determine which of two terms is more popular on the Internet. Who is the more popular painter, Van Gogh or Rembrandt? The Beatles or the Stones? [go there]

Google Best Time to Visit
Google Best Time to Visit is a simple application of using Google search results to extract knowledge. Here the question is, what is the best time to visit a place. This way you can learn when to plan your next holliday. [go there]

Google Pos
GooglePos is a small python script that uses the google api to find out what position your website has for a certain keyword (or set of). How do I score for Google Hacks? [go there]

Google Protocol
Google Protocol is a little app that when installed, registers two extra protocols similar to the http: and the ftp: protocols under windows, namely google: and lucky: . Urls starting with the first refer to the corresponding google search. Urls starting with the second refer to the top Google result. [go there]