New Google functions, including patent searching

Via Lifehacker -- Google has launched a beta version of Google Patent Search.

Results include the entire collection of the United States Patent and Trademark Office from the 1790s through mid-2006 (~ 7M patents total). The documentation notes that each result includes:

1. Patent Title: The title of each entry in the search results is the title of that specific patent.
2. U.S. Patent Number: The patent office assigns a unique number to each patent.
3. Filing Date: The filing date is the date on which the patent was filed with the USPTO. The filing date is when the inventors applied for the patent and should not be confused with the issue date, which is the date the patent office granted the patent. If we don’t have a filing date for a patent, this field will be blank.
4. Assignee name: The assignee is the person or organization to which the rights of the patent are assigned. If we don’t have an assignee for a patent, this field will be blank.
5. Patent snippet: We include a snippet of text from the patent to show where the specific search terms were found.

Only US patents are included at this time and the interface is only available in English. More information here and here.

And also via Lifehacker, "15 unusual ways to use Google," including tips on how to use Google more effectively an encyclopedia/reference tool, track packages, etc.

The patient side of web-based diagnosis

Dr. Marla Shapiro of The Globe and Mail discusses the patient side of diagnosing using the Internet in a recent article, "Self-diagnose off the Web at your peril"

A recent article in the medical journal The Lancet reported the case of a 64-year-old woman who diagnosed herself with chronic fatigue syndrome and then proceeded to self-medicate with oral steroids that she had purchased over the Internet, rather than being prescribed medication by her physician. She had been taking the medication in varying doses over a four-year period. She developed dense cataracts in both eyes and glaucoma (high pressure in the eye), both of which were induced by the steroid use. These side effects of steroids are well known to physicians. It is clear that the patient was unaware of the dangerous side effects and had gone unmonitored, putting herself in this serious situation.

The Lancet reference: Severn PS, Fraser SG. Bilateral cataracts and glaucoma induced by long-term use of oral prednisolone bought over the internet. Lancet. 2006 Aug 12;368(9535):618. (PubMed record)

Related article: There's also been a lot of talk this week about a study published in the British Medical Journal, "Googling for a diagnosis--use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study," an experimental study that examine the utility of Google searches for diagnosing 26 cases from the New England Journal of Medicine, noting "Google searches revealed the correct diagnosis in 15 (58%, 95% confidence interval 38% to 77%) cases." (lots of blog commentary on this article available via a quick Google BlogSearch)

Another new search engine: SearchMash

SearchMash is a new search interface from Google (a little bit hidden, disclosed on the Privacy page). The Features page lists the current features of the engine:

- when you click a URL in the search results, you have a few options that are similar to the links below a search result entry in the original Google (open a cached copy, more from this site, results similar to this page)
- it automatically displays a few images for each search
- no ads
- you can drag and drop results to change the order
- instead of clicking to a new page to see more results, they open in the same window, adding below the previously viewed results (can either click "more web pages" or use your space bar)

I tried a few searches and it worked fine; didn't seem dramatically different from the same results in the original Google. I kind of like seeing a few image results but some have found it irritating and an abuse of bandwidth (e.g. the DaveN post linked below).

More description and commentary:
- Information Week: "Google launches experimental search engine "
- Search Engine Guide: "Google's SearchMash"
- Search Engine Watch: "Google's new SearchMash test site"
- Inside Google: "Google running SearchMash"
- DaveN: "Google's worst ever product"
- More via Google's BlogSearch and Technorati

Data storage and retrieval in the "Internet cloud"

This month's issue of Wired includes an article "The Information Factories" - the piece is subcaptioned, "The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age."

The article discusses the Google datacenters and Ask.com, including storage capacity, power consumption, plans for growth, and the potential impact of future developments in computing power and data storage.

"According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born?

How will we feed it?

How will it be tamed?

And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?

One characteristic of this new machine is clear. It arises from a world measured in the prefix giga, but its operating environment is the petascale. We're all petaphiles now, plugged into a world of petabytes, petaops, petaflops. Mouthing the prefix peta (signifying numbers of the magnitude 10 to the 15th power, a million billion) and the Latin verb petere (to search), we are doubly petacentric in our peregrinations through the hypertrophic network cloud."