You haven’t seen this before? Give it a try by entering the following:
This works with a whole lot of search queries. You can even enter Who is Clark
Population of
President of
President of
Birthday of George Bush
Birthday of Albert Einstein
What is the birthday of Albert Einstein?
Who was President of the
When did Isaac Asimov die?
Isaac Asimov date of birth
Isaac Asimov birthday
What is the birthplace of Bono?
Bono birth place
Who is Prime Minister of
Where is the Eiffel tower
Where is the Statue of
When was Star Wars released?
Who is the Queen of the
Who wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Catch-22 author
Permutated Sentences
Before Google’s Q&A feature, a fun way to find instant facts was to move around the words of a question sentence until you hit on an answer. To explain, let’s say your question is “When was Albert Einstein born?” We remove the first word, “when”. We’ll now do a search for the several possible rearrangements of the words, and check the Google page count for each:
• “Albert was Einstein born” (0 results)
• “born was Albert Einstein” (0 results)
• “Albert Einstein was born” (17,500 results)
• “Albert was born Einstein” (5 results)
... and so on.
The one phrase search of these returning the most results is our “fact finder.” In this case it would almost certainly be “Albert Einstein was born”, and the continuation of this sentence contains our answer. This can be automated, but takes a while as going through all permutations requires many Google searches. FindForward’s “Ask Question” search (findforward.com/?t=answer) returns the following answer (you can see there are some left-overs from the snippet which aren’t meaningful in this context):
1879, Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 German born American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity.
