A Glimpse Into Google's Brain, Hidden In A Spreadsheet App: It's essentially Google-powered word association — not a window into the world of Google engineers, but into the internet's collective view of how things are related to one another.
It doesn't just work for beer, car brands, colors, states, or websites, as reported, but just about any category you can think of. The feature was an outgrowth of a discontinued Google Labs project called Google Sets, so it's no longer pulling real time information.
There are useful applications — it's easy to imagine using the list of states, for example, in creating a survey. "It is also one of those things we do things at Google that's whimsical and just for fun," says a Google spokesperson. "It is a snapshot of words and concepts that are connected to each other on the web." And, in a small but real way, a peek into the giant data-logged brain of the most powerful search engine in the world.