Google Moderator Finds the Best Questions

The latest Google App allows the masses to evaluate each others' questions and sort out the best ones to ask - be it a speaker or Google engineer.

Google’s famed 20 percent program bore yet another offspring on Thursday: a new application that democratizes the question-asking process in meetings. Google Moderator allows participants in a large-scale, real-life meeting to evaluate each others’ questions to make sure the most important ones get asked.

Google engineer Taliver Heath dreamed up the application as a solution to Google’s increasingly crowded “tech talks” where speakers discuss technical issues. Rather than having participants randomly pitching out questions and wasting a presenter’s time with duds, Heath envisioned a tool that would push the best questions to the front of the room. The tool came to be known internally as Dory, after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, then went public on Thursday as Google Moderator.

Although Moderator’s original use may have been for in-person meetings, the implementation currently available also has online uses. For instance, users can submit questions for Google engineers: anything from technical questions like “How would you sort 1 million 32-bit integers in 2MB of RAM?” to the more pointed, like questions about Google’s filtering of human right Web sites from its Chinese search engine.

Like all of Google’s apps, Moderator is available for free online, though users most register a Google account to suggest and vote on issues.