Toys from Google Labs: Finding Sets

I stumbled across a toy under development at Google, Google Sets. If I am reading things correctly, this particular tool must not be under very active development because I believe its inception date was 2002.

At any rate, the basic idea of the tool is to enter up to five search terms, and the algorithm will attempt to make either a Small Set (15 items or fewer) or a Large Set from those items.

For example, if you enter titles of reality television shows, it returns more reality shows.

However, it appears to be a bit useful for stalking.

I entered my name and the names of two former colleagues, "samuel bradley", "yongkuk chung", and "mija shin". If you do that and click Large Set, you get a pretty nice list of my former colleagues in the Institute for Communications Research at Indiana University.

Cool ... and spooky.

See Airplanes Land on Google Maps

How cool is this? A satellite just happened to catch a jet landing at Sky Harbor International Airport (where I used to work) in Phoenix.

Thanks to Roger Verschraegen, who pointed out a similar shot at the Frankfurt airport. That one is much cooler because successive images got the 747 taking off from Frankfurt three times.

Check out "Frankfurt airport" on Google maps and then scroll to the right (east of the airport) to see the Lufthansa 747 take off.