Google Squared

Google Squared

Google has released a few enhancements to Google Squared, its attempt to build spreadsheets out of search results. Google Squared is a Google Labs project first unveiled in May at its Searchology event and set loose on the world a month later. The idea is to take the search results for a given query, such as "U.S. presidents" or "European countries," and present the results as a table with facts and dates helpfully sorted for easier research. The company announced on Friday "a number of improvements to the amount and quality of information you can find with Google Squared, as well as new tools to sort and export the data," it said in a blog post. For example, Google Squared can now return 120 facts organized in rows and columns, as opposed to just 30 at launch. The filters have gotten better as well, which was a definite problem with the first batch of Google Squared results. It's still not ready for prime time, however: according to Google Squared, the Milwaukee Brewers play home games in both Milwaukee and San Diego. It had no idea what city is home to Yankee Stadium--let alone which New York borough--and it also seemed to miss the grand opening this year of a new Yankee Stadium to replace The House That Ruth Built.

Google said Squared is an experiment in "understanding structured data from across the Web to build new tools for organizing and presenting information." Despite plans to offload its back-end search technology, Yahoo is trying to keep its name in the game as a search company by conducting much of the same research.Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. As we explained when we first launched Squared in Labs this summer, the product takes on a difficult technical challenge. It's a first step towards automatically extracting useful facts from all over the web and presenting them in meaningful way. It has the potential to be particularly useful for research questions where the answers may not live on a single website, but instead must be combined from many different pages.

Rather than return a list of the most relevant websites, Squared returns a "square" (or table) of facts, sourced from across the Internet. For example, if you search Squared for [us presidents], each row on the resulting table represents a particular United States President, and the columns include relevant facts about him, such as date of birth, a picture and a short description. At launch, your first square could include at most 30 facts. With today's update, squares display four times as much data — up to 120 facts. For example, instead of seeing only five presidents and three categories, now you'll see a table with 20 presidents and up to six attributes. The quality of the information is also better, because we're ranking based on both relevance to your query and whether we can find high quality facts. For example, in the past we would show you a column for "First Lady" even if the column only included a couple accurate names. Now we're actively filtering out items (rows) and attributes (columns) from the initial square if we haven't found enough accurate data. Perhaps more interesting, we built Squared to learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone.