Sunday, December 2, 2007

Firefox IS Out of the Box

Computers have come a long way from the text based consoles but we are still a long way from the smart machines which would understand what we are trying to do as opposed to having to explain what exactly we want to do with it. Recently I noticed Firefox doing something really awesome, to get to a site you don't need to remember obscure names just type in what you remember about the site, Firefox will take you there!!!!!
Well.. This is no exaggeration... try it out yourself.. To get to the Times Of India website you dont have to remember http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/, just type in times of india in the address bar, press enter.. and there you go... Now it is obvious it is doing a smart search behind the scenes and also obvious is the fact that Google is helping it out big time, turns out that it is doing a "I am feeling Lucky" on Google however, the fact that really surprised me was that if the string in the address bar is not a very good search string... For e.g. Entering "india strategy" does not take you to indiastrategy.com instead takes you to the Google search page for india strategy!!!! Now that is what I call Out of the Box thinking >:)

6 comments:

Tarun said...

What if someone really wants to go to the website indiastrategy.com? For the m/c has not worked as expected !!! So, for an individual who might consider Firefox or the m/c as his servant, has not recieved the proper service from his/her servant.
Reaching the times of india website is really based on its popularity which actually is based on the choices of a lot of users not individual wishes.
:)

Khushboo said...

It does a lot more than that .... type the name of any famous academic person and it will directly take you to their homepage..
try "Jennifer Welch" in the address bar .. :)

Also for non-academic famous people, it takes to the wiki page :)...
I love this feature of firefox..

Tarun said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tarun said...

Well I don't have any bias but would like to push up the neglected ones in the competition. Thanks to Google Toolbar, IE does this too !!!

Fasihullah said...

I am not saying that IE is crap load of bullshit (Do I have to say that?) what I am saying is that this is an intuitive interface to browsing... well... to answer tarun's question... If somebody DOES want to go to indiastrategy.com... he is free to do that... the machine is a slave... but it is not a mind reader (not till now at least...) u asked it to go to a site about india strategy... it figured u wanted to go to some site.... welll... at least as of now... all the guesses it makes for me is excellent...and never wrong once... it knows me pretty well... in case it makes a wrong guess... u can always say indiastrategy.com it does not double guess u... so i still love it... :)

Tarun said...

well I am not a fan of IE either... in fact i am fan of none of the two...nobody loves any of them.. we all love what works for us...
as far as intuitive browsing is concerned... google has made the big difference in the way any browser works or infact any web user works.
at last... whatever I use... but the web surfing experience is what I am loving... !!! :)