Talking with Other Googlers / Google For Dummies

Talking with Other Googlers

Google encourages discussion among its users. To that end, Google has set up several (11, to be exact) Usenet newsgroups in Google Groups (see Chapter 4). Google is especially interested in generating conversation around the Google Labs experiments (see Chapter 8). In those groups dedicated to Webquotes, Google Sets, and other lab mutations, you can occasionally log a rare sighting of a Google representative taking suggestions and answering questions.

Following is a list of newsgroups about Google, as of this writing:

google.public.labs.compute
google.public.labs.glossary
google.public.labs.google-viewer
google.public.labs.keyboard-shortcuts
google.public.labs.sets
google.public.labs.voice-search
google.public.labs.webquotes
google.public.programming-contest
google.public.support.general
google.public.public.translators
google.public.labs.web-apis

Remember

You might find these groups in a stand-alone newsgroup reader, depending on your Usenet provider. But you won't find any discussions in those groups and you'll wonder why I pointed you to them. Google doesn't distribute the content of its public groups throughout Usenet, so you must access them through Google Groups. See Chapter 4 to find out how to search for newsgroups in Google.

Figure 17-3 illustrates the google.public.support.general newsgroup as seen in Google Groups. This group is the place to turn for general discussion and help with Google features not found in Google Labs.

Figure 17-3: The general Google support newsgroup. It becomes busy and sometimes frantic during the Google dance.