Google Talk Guru Brings Search To Instant Messaging

Google Talk Guru is a new experiment that tries to turn the instant messaging interface into a search engine of sorts. It was just added to Google Labs today, and is very much a lab-level project.

There are a very limited number of search commands that currently work in Google Talk Guru. As you can see from the screenshot above, searches for international times aren’t supported (#1 and #2 above), but weather search (#3) and even a simple web search (#4) are. The web search is kinda like the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google.com — it returns only the first result for your search query and an option to see the second result by replying with “next.”

It’s somewhat reminiscent of Aardvark, the Q&A service that Google bought in February 2010, which offers a sort-of “social search” via instant message (and other platforms).

Google Talk Guru currently supports seven search commands.

(via Google Operating System)