12 ms·

Google Docs makes it easy to do market research

207 points by jasonkolb 14y ago

jon_c 14y ago
cf. related patent http://www.google.com/patents/US7350187?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.google.com/patents/US7350187?printsec=abstract#v=...
- swah 14y ago
  W/ Jeff Dean cameo!
josephjrobison 14y ago
This is pretty awesome - I would use it for very quick brainstorming to get the ball rolling since it's not extremely accurate, but still useful for ten words! For more keyword suggestions I like ubersuggest.org a lot.
- ianfernz 14y ago
  Thank you for this link, I had never heard of them!
tvladeck 14y ago
This doesn't work for me. I tried putting "chianti" and "merlot" in just like the little video, and after dragging across the cells I just got "chianti" and "merlot" repeating.
- tvladeck 14y ago
  ok - my bad. you have to hold down the ctrl/command key when you are dragging.
  - gk1 14y ago
    Wow, I'd never have thought to try that. I do remember using Google Sets but did not know it made it into Google Drive. I wonder what other neat features are hidden in there.
  - a1k0n 14y ago
    I have to use the option key, FWIW. ctrl and command don't work.
  - nkoren 14y ago
    Only appears to work on Windows. Haven't found any way to trigger it on OSX. Edit: it's alt on the Mac
fdb 14y ago
This is based on the now defunct Google Sets, a Google labs experiment. It looks at ordered and unordered lists in HTML to find related items. Here's the official blog post covering this: http://googlesystem.blogspot.be/2012/11/google-sets-still-available.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.be/2012/11/google-sets-still-av...
- andybons 14y ago
  Actually, I implemented the feature and it was first launched in 2007 – http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/09/google-spreadsheets-lets-you-import.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/09/google-spreadsheets... And Google Operating System isn't an official blog of Google :)
  - piyush_soni 14y ago
    It looks like a great feature! Do you know why was it discontinued?
  - essayist 14y ago
    So my guess is that (a) the Google Sets feature is discontinued, much to the dismay of the implementing team, (b) they (you?) see a lifeboat in putting this into Google Docs. It's way better there than deep-sixed entirely, but Google Sets was pretty useful to me as a standalone tool - cleaner UI for the capability.
    - andybons 14y ago
      FYI, I don't work for Google anymore. They shut down the consumer frontend to Google Sets but there are clearly internal instances still running to power this feature (it may also be used in coming up with related terms in another ad tech product, but I'm not sure). I was new to the Google Spreadsheets team back in 2007 and autofill was a feature that had not been implemented yet. We thought it would be a cool thing to make it a bit better by adding Sets support, so I worked with Simon Tong—the author of Google Sets—to get it playing nice with autofill. To be clear, I did not write Sets. Simon did. This feature has been live since 2007. It was not created to be a lifeboat for Sets and the frontend getting shut down is the result of (my guess) low user traffic.
yalogin 14y ago
This works great. I am currently looking to get a small DB of related keywords and just beginning to think about how to get them. This is awesome. It needs two cells to get some context. One cell does not work and should be expected. On a slightly related note, what do people usually do if they want a list of all say, manufacturers of Sunglasses? I usually am way behind the web server in C and recently dabbling into the JS and python world.
- netrus 14y ago
  I can only speak about Germany, but there still are tons of catalogs, registers and databases (both in print and online), listing companies that supply specific goods. I am not sure about the US equivalent of Handelskammern or Chambre de Commerce.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    Here in the US, a place like hoovers.com would be a good starting point for that sort of thing. There's probably also something like the "Sunglass Manufacturer's Industry Association" which probably maintains such a list. There are also government databases of various sorts, and things like the Chamber of Commerce, etc.
    - yalogin 14y ago
      I used the Sunglass manufacturers as an example. Did not mean that literally. I was asking for a more general approach to get lists of related things, exactly like Google sets. Did not know it existed while it did.
      - mindcrime 14y ago
        Right, I was also just using that as an example. You could substitute the "Sunglass Manufacturer's Industry Association" for the "Mechanical Pencil Industry Association" or the "Nuclear Fuel Rod Manufacturing Association" or whatever. :-) In either case, the point about Hoovers, various government databases, etc., still stands.
coderhs 14y ago
Awesome.. would save a good amount of time.. :D
danso 14y ago
Cool trick! I thought maybe this would be a good way to generate a list of fifty states (without having to find a random page that has a straight-up list) and so I started out by typing: Alabama Delaware Connecticut Iowa And dragged down, however, it only found me roughly 20 more states. I guess there must be a limitation of the query interface...i.e. "find related items, limit 20", rather than: "This user is looking for all 50 state names, so autofill" -- edit: And for the hell of it, I entered three of George Carlin's seven dirty words and it only returned a fourth (and a few other non-canonical-dirty-words)
- jakerocheleau 14y ago
  This is off topic but I absolutely love George Carlin. Very smart guy and well before his time. Just went back and listened to his seven words bit, still just as hilarious.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  I got all 50 states when I tried it. Make sure you use lowercase or it'll duplicate the ones you entered.
- piyush_soni 14y ago
  I also noticed that it inserts some empty rows in between. So if it appears to not to show results anymore, just drag it even more, it'll show the rest of them with more empty rows in between .
Adaptive 14y ago
This is a perfect example of Google's absolute failure at marketing docs/apps. If this had been rolled out as a feature in Apple Pages, we'd have seen it demonstrated on stage, even if only for a moment, and given an easy to remember name (Pages with "Cloud Complete", Pages with "Net Functions", etc.). There would have been deserved oohs and ahhs. It would have been widely reported on and helped ship units. Google buries the lede and thus misses another great opportunity to show off a really neat feature.
- senthil_rajasek 14y ago
  May be this is intentional on Google's part. I tried a few samples and the result was not always what the G+ Post suggests. For example, I tried Nimitz, Independence, expecting the rest of the cells to be filled with a few more US Navy Aircraft Carriers and the result was nowhere close. Advertising/Marketing a "feature" that does not work as intended is a far worse scenario for Google than the current state.
  - pyoung 14y ago
    According to the buzzfeed article, the feature was pulled from a discontinued project called Google Sets. So yeah, sounds like they had a cool feature built that is no longer getting updated and they decided to toss it in to google docs. http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/a-glimpse-into-googles-brain-hidden-in-a-spreadsheet-app http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/a-glimpse-into-googl... I personally think this is awesome. EDIT: ahh, sorry. Just saw the other comment that points out Google Sets. Anyway, this is really cool, playing around with it now, when I should be working.
- czr80 14y ago
  This is Google Sets, and I recall Google making a big splash about that, seemingly as a way to respond to Wolfram Alpha, which had just launched.
  - robrenaud 14y ago
    I think you've got your timeline confused. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha > Wolfram Alpha was announced in March 2009 and subsequently released on May 15, 2009.[1] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2111106/Rock-the-Vote-A-Petition-to-Bring-Back-Google-Sets http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2111106/Rock-the-Vote-A... > Rise of Google Sets > Originally launched in 2002, Google Sets was truly an innovation in the keyword research tool landscape.
thecombjelly 14y ago
I wonder how well the terms correlate with regards to search traffic. I often build up a list of search terms in the google adwords tool and see the traffic estimates for them and related keywords for evaluating niche markets.
lukeasrodgers 14y ago
My first thought was: will this work with Borges' "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge" taxonomy? It (mostly) does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledges_Taxonomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...
- hnriot 14y ago
  you meant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledges_Taxonomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
tantalor 14y ago
Previously discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764169 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764169
JacobIrwin 14y ago
Is there an app or API out there that does something similar... yet...?
nileshbhojani 14y ago
With the accuracy of data questionable and the universe of data undefined, at best this is entertaining :-)
brianbreslin 14y ago
these sets are "interesting" to say the least. I tried it out putting "blonde, brunette" figuring it would give me hair colors.... I figured wrong.
indignado 14y ago
I'm a musician so I immediately started typing in a variety of band names and genres. After a few experiments I started to figure out ideal associations. Cool way to discover/rediscover related bands...
SirPulse 14y ago
Should be useful when playing family feud. ;)

207 points by jasonkolb 14y ago

jon_c 14y ago

cf. related patent http://www.google.com/patents/US7350187?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.google.com/patents/US7350187?printsec=abstract#v=...

swah 14y ago
W/ Jeff Dean cameo!

josephjrobison 14y ago

This is pretty awesome - I would use it for very quick brainstorming to get the ball rolling since it's not extremely accurate, but still useful for ten words! For more keyword suggestions I like ubersuggest.org a lot.

ianfernz 14y ago
Thank you for this link, I had never heard of them!

tvladeck 14y ago

This doesn't work for me. I tried putting "chianti" and "merlot" in just like the little video, and after dragging across the cells I just got "chianti" and "merlot" repeating.

tvladeck 14y ago
ok - my bad. you have to hold down the ctrl/command key when you are dragging.
- gk1 14y ago
  Wow, I'd never have thought to try that. I do remember using Google Sets but did not know it made it into Google Drive. I wonder what other neat features are hidden in there.
- a1k0n 14y ago
  I have to use the option key, FWIW. ctrl and command don't work.
- nkoren 14y ago
  Only appears to work on Windows. Haven't found any way to trigger it on OSX. Edit: it's alt on the Mac

fdb 14y ago

This is based on the now defunct Google Sets, a Google labs experiment. It looks at ordered and unordered lists in HTML to find related items. Here's the official blog post covering this: http://googlesystem.blogspot.be/2012/11/google-sets-still-available.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.be/2012/11/google-sets-still-av...

andybons 14y ago
Actually, I implemented the feature and it was first launched in 2007 – http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/09/google-spreadsheets-lets-you-import.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/09/google-spreadsheets... And Google Operating System isn't an official blog of Google :)
- piyush_soni 14y ago
  It looks like a great feature! Do you know why was it discontinued?
- essayist 14y ago
  So my guess is that (a) the Google Sets feature is discontinued, much to the dismay of the implementing team, (b) they (you?) see a lifeboat in putting this into Google Docs. It's way better there than deep-sixed entirely, but Google Sets was pretty useful to me as a standalone tool - cleaner UI for the capability.
  - andybons 14y ago
    FYI, I don't work for Google anymore. They shut down the consumer frontend to Google Sets but there are clearly internal instances still running to power this feature (it may also be used in coming up with related terms in another ad tech product, but I'm not sure). I was new to the Google Spreadsheets team back in 2007 and autofill was a feature that had not been implemented yet. We thought it would be a cool thing to make it a bit better by adding Sets support, so I worked with Simon Tong—the author of Google Sets—to get it playing nice with autofill. To be clear, I did not write Sets. Simon did. This feature has been live since 2007. It was not created to be a lifeboat for Sets and the frontend getting shut down is the result of (my guess) low user traffic.

yalogin 14y ago

This works great. I am currently looking to get a small DB of related keywords and just beginning to think about how to get them. This is awesome. It needs two cells to get some context. One cell does not work and should be expected. On a slightly related note, what do people usually do if they want a list of all say, manufacturers of Sunglasses? I usually am way behind the web server in C and recently dabbling into the JS and python world.

netrus 14y ago
I can only speak about Germany, but there still are tons of catalogs, registers and databases (both in print and online), listing companies that supply specific goods. I am not sure about the US equivalent of Handelskammern or Chambre de Commerce.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  Here in the US, a place like hoovers.com would be a good starting point for that sort of thing. There's probably also something like the "Sunglass Manufacturer's Industry Association" which probably maintains such a list. There are also government databases of various sorts, and things like the Chamber of Commerce, etc.
  - yalogin 14y ago
    I used the Sunglass manufacturers as an example. Did not mean that literally. I was asking for a more general approach to get lists of related things, exactly like Google sets. Did not know it existed while it did.
    - mindcrime 14y ago
      Right, I was also just using that as an example. You could substitute the "Sunglass Manufacturer's Industry Association" for the "Mechanical Pencil Industry Association" or the "Nuclear Fuel Rod Manufacturing Association" or whatever. :-) In either case, the point about Hoovers, various government databases, etc., still stands.

coderhs 14y ago

Awesome.. would save a good amount of time.. :D

danso 14y ago

Cool trick! I thought maybe this would be a good way to generate a list of fifty states (without having to find a random page that has a straight-up list) and so I started out by typing: Alabama Delaware Connecticut Iowa And dragged down, however, it only found me roughly 20 more states. I guess there must be a limitation of the query interface...i.e. "find related items, limit 20", rather than: "This user is looking for all 50 state names, so autofill" -- edit: And for the hell of it, I entered three of George Carlin's seven dirty words and it only returned a fourth (and a few other non-canonical-dirty-words)

jakerocheleau 14y ago
This is off topic but I absolutely love George Carlin. Very smart guy and well before his time. Just went back and listened to his seven words bit, still just as hilarious.
ceejayoz 14y ago
I got all 50 states when I tried it. Make sure you use lowercase or it'll duplicate the ones you entered.
piyush_soni 14y ago
I also noticed that it inserts some empty rows in between. So if it appears to not to show results anymore, just drag it even more, it'll show the rest of them with more empty rows in between .

Adaptive 14y ago

This is a perfect example of Google's absolute failure at marketing docs/apps. If this had been rolled out as a feature in Apple Pages, we'd have seen it demonstrated on stage, even if only for a moment, and given an easy to remember name (Pages with "Cloud Complete", Pages with "Net Functions", etc.). There would have been deserved oohs and ahhs. It would have been widely reported on and helped ship units. Google buries the lede and thus misses another great opportunity to show off a really neat feature.

senthil_rajasek 14y ago
May be this is intentional on Google's part. I tried a few samples and the result was not always what the G+ Post suggests. For example, I tried Nimitz, Independence, expecting the rest of the cells to be filled with a few more US Navy Aircraft Carriers and the result was nowhere close. Advertising/Marketing a "feature" that does not work as intended is a far worse scenario for Google than the current state.
- pyoung 14y ago
  According to the buzzfeed article, the feature was pulled from a discontinued project called Google Sets. So yeah, sounds like they had a cool feature built that is no longer getting updated and they decided to toss it in to google docs. http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/a-glimpse-into-googles-brain-hidden-in-a-spreadsheet-app http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/a-glimpse-into-googl... I personally think this is awesome. EDIT: ahh, sorry. Just saw the other comment that points out Google Sets. Anyway, this is really cool, playing around with it now, when I should be working.
czr80 14y ago
This is Google Sets, and I recall Google making a big splash about that, seemingly as a way to respond to Wolfram Alpha, which had just launched.
- robrenaud 14y ago
  I think you've got your timeline confused. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha > Wolfram Alpha was announced in March 2009 and subsequently released on May 15, 2009.[1] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2111106/Rock-the-Vote-A-Petition-to-Bring-Back-Google-Sets http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2111106/Rock-the-Vote-A... > Rise of Google Sets > Originally launched in 2002, Google Sets was truly an innovation in the keyword research tool landscape.

thecombjelly 14y ago

I wonder how well the terms correlate with regards to search traffic. I often build up a list of search terms in the google adwords tool and see the traffic estimates for them and related keywords for evaluating niche markets.

lukeasrodgers 14y ago

My first thought was: will this work with Borges' "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge" taxonomy? It (mostly) does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledges_Taxonomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...

hnriot 14y ago
you meant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledges_Taxonomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

tantalor 14y ago

Previously discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764169 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764169

JacobIrwin 14y ago

Is there an app or API out there that does something similar... yet...?

nileshbhojani 14y ago

With the accuracy of data questionable and the universe of data undefined, at best this is entertaining :-)

brianbreslin 14y ago

these sets are "interesting" to say the least. I tried it out putting "blonde, brunette" figuring it would give me hair colors.... I figured wrong.

indignado 14y ago

I'm a musician so I immediately started typing in a variety of band names and genres. After a few experiments I started to figure out ideal associations. Cool way to discover/rediscover related bands...

SirPulse 14y ago

Should be useful when playing family feud. ;)