Fun with My Answers

The other day I was looking for a particular South Park meme to respond to a co-worker’s message (as one does), and encountered an interesting result page from Google.

Clearly I want to find the Cartman link, but was surprised to see Google importing my own calendar entries for this search term.  So I tested a few different variations before I finally noticed the “learn more” link. Turns out this was just a feature that I’d overlooked when the flight and contact info rolled out.

Funny thing is, when I try to search for “what are my plans for tomorrow”, I don’t get anything that looks like my original image, or anything special at all.

Hmmm…

So I tried a few more variations to see how smart it was.

Searches that showed my calendar items:
– I do what I want
– Today’s Agenda (though it did not mention the suitcase up in the Sentra)
– this week’s agenda
– the month’s agenda (which properly curtailed itself at the end of the month)
– May agenda (which skipped quite a bit and only showed two items for May)
– this week schedule

Other searches that didn’t work:
– agenda
– to do
– to do list
– to do today
– next month’s agenda
– may to do

This observation may not be terribly insightful, but it is interesting to see the implementation, and limitations, or machine learning and data cross-over.

Note: This may have been a test or potential bug, as the same search term today does not bring back my calendar entries.

Related articles

• Google is testing new UI and features for Google Calendar (geek.com)
• Hightrack Combines Your Agenda, To-Dos, and Weekly Review In One Tool (lifehacker.com)
• Google’s 2014 Redesign: Before and After (moz.com)
• Google knows what you’ll do tomorrow (denverpost.com)