(Google says that they personally read each suggestion and try to respond to all of them).

2/26/2004 First suggestion:
Thanks so much for the calculator feature.

Would it be hard to add a molecular weight calculator as well? For example, if I punch in CaCl2 (or type calcium chloride) it would return the first entry as its molecular weight, and maybe even add a direct link to the appropriate chemfinder.com page as well. This would be similar to the direct link to dictionary.com.

3/05/2004 Google’s Response:
Hi Scott,

Regards,
The Google Team

3/29/2004 Second suggestion:
First of all, I love the new look! Great job on iconifying the “More” tab. The pictures are much easier on the eye than the text that was there previously. And here are a couple of suggestions that could possibly be added to the feature list:
1) Since Google now owns Blogger.com, a great feature would be to make blog.google.com a weblog search engine, encompassing not only Blogger but all the other weblogs. Eventually, the top blog search results for a given search could be incorporated into the main search page. As it is, with blogs included in searches with the standard websites, the top couple of hits are sometimes all exactly the same weblog data, just linked to different pages. (Though I just tried to replicate this and couldn’t). I believe that separating the blogs from the rest of the Internet would make some searches more efficient. (Though it might detract from some of Google’s search simplicity…)

2) I have yet to try the Google Labs Personalization thing, but the idea sounds great. Could this same concept be implemented for Google News? I’m running a news ticker from Memigo (http://memigo.com/about) on my box right now. It searches through tons of news sites (included news aggregators such as news.google.com) and presents them in a unobtrusive way with the only ads being the text-based ones delivered by Google. For each article, I have the option to rate how much I liked the article and based on that, it “intelligently” scans the Internet for news that would appeal to me. There is also the ability to comment for up to 48 hours after an article appears. I’m not suggesting to copy it exactly as Microsoft is trying to do right now…but to use some of its [ideas or maybe incorporate Memigo into Google News].

3/31/2004 Google’s Response:
Hi Scott,

Regards,
The Google Team

4/23/2004 Third suggestion:
I’m trying to put together a pvr that will run mythtv. I’ve been using
Froogle to assess the best prices on the various components necessary
to build it. Currently, I search for one product and get a list of
stores and prices, and then search for another product and get another
list of stores and prices. Most of the time, a store that sells the
cpu that I want, will also sell the hard drive that I want. In order
to save on shipping, I’d like to buy as many products as I can from
the same store (if the prices are still competitive). Therefore, the
suggestion is this: Add an ability to input multiple items at once.
Froogle Sets (possible name) would search for each product and then
compose a page showing the stores that sell all the products (or a
good majority of them). It may even be helpful to tabulate the total
price. This way, customers such as myself would not have to physically
record on a sheet of paper the price of the components and then add
then up on a calculator.

I don’t think that implementing something like this would be that
hard…considering all the other technological feats you guys have
pulled off. What do you think?

Keep up the great work! BTW, I was searching for plane tickets
yesterday and was having a very difficult time in finding the correct
arrival and departure combinations that I needed. One website would
have the correct arrival time and the others would have the departure,
but finding one site, such as orbitz.com, that had the entire package
was difficult or near possible. Jokingly, I was thinking that Google’s
search ability, when setup to work with airline ticketing would be
very helpful! tickets.google.com…. in the future? 😉

Google’s Response:
Hello Scott,

The Google Team

4/25/2004 Fourth Suggestion:
There are two ways of searching for a definition, you can search for
“define: word” or “define word.” The former will only give you
definitions, while the later will return the top definition and then
the other search results. The “define: word” search works great.
However, there are problems when searching for “define word.” Google
will correctly give you the top definition but then will search for
websites that included the terms, “define” and “word.” I don’t believe
that this is the search that people want for this case. A good fix
would be to necessitate adding a + in front of “define” if you want to
actually search for it as one of the search terms and not as a command
to search for the definition. So, this search “+define word” would
work as it does now, giving the main definition on the top and then
the sites that include “define” and “word.” But, searching for “define
word” should return the top definition and then the results of
searching only for “word.” This way, one could have easy access to the
definition and the appropriate web pages.

Google’s Response:
Thank you for the suggestion. We really appreciate thoughtful feedback
from our users, and we’ll keep yours in mind as we work to improve Google.

Regards,
The Google Team

Gmail Suggestions:
Another great feature would be to create your own conversations. For example, if you have a group of friends that are all talking about a baseball game that you want to go to as a group, you could combine all those emails into one conversation. While, Gmail’s method of doing conversations works great for responses and replies from one person, emails with different subjects from many different people (but all relating to a single topic) would be difficult to construct automatically into a single conversation.

To remedy this, you could check the emails that you want to add to a conversation and then click the “More actions…” drop down button and Gmail would create a conversation using the time that the email was received to decide on the position within the email.

Google’s Response:
None received yet…

Note to Microsoft, Yahoo, any competitors…please don’t steal my ideas or Google’s ideas. Thanks!