Google has a new experimental feature on Google Labs called Google Glossary. It finds and extracts definitions of words and phrases from web sites. I had success with therapeutic cloning, Java Beans, temperature inversion, and multiple inheritance but not with reproductive cloning. Where dictionaries rarely list two or three word combinations that have some specific technical or cultural meaning it appears that Google Glossary can come back with decent definitions at least some of the time.

Google also has something called Google Sets that is very cool. Give it names of things from a set and it tries to predict other words that also belong in the same set. For instance, Buffy, Willow and Tara successfully yield a list of other characters from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Kirk and McCoy successfully return a list of Star Trek TOS crew members. I mean, how neat is that? Sex, drugs, rock successfully predicts "roll". You get the idea. Some of the results are, well, curious. Chopin, Bach, and Mozart return a list of mostly classical composers. But Elvis is on the list and so is the word "Introduction". If you come up with any interesting word combinations please come back and post them in the comments to this post.