Legal Research

Google Squared Needs a Bit More Time in the Easy Bake Oven

Yesterday Google announced a new product out of Google Labs: Google Squared. (Three “Googles” in that last sentence — top that!) What does G Squared do?

“Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.”

Does it work? Sort of. Here are a few sample Squares I created this morning:

• u.s. secretaries of state - the first 14 or so look OK. The only clunker is “United States” as the second item in the collection. Also, Hilary Clinton is listed simply as “Clinton”. (Guess it’s better than “That Woman”.) But if I search for u.s. secretary of state, it blows up — the first four are Homeland Security, Italiano, Functions, Eesti. Ugh!

• towns in delaware county, pa - Not bad, actually. But I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb — the inability to sort by column (in my case, by town name) is frustrating. Ditto for a search of nobel peace prize winners — I’d really like to sort ‘em by name.

Google is really constrained by its legacy results page, the 10 Blue Links we’ve become used to seeing over the past decade. They’ve recently introduced Search Options, but they’re useful for only a small fraction of my searches. Wolfram | Alpha, the obvious competitor for Google Squared, has some advantages: (a) they’re new, so the legacy results page thing doesn’t apply to them, and (b) they’ve been working on their system a lot longer than Google’s been working on Squared.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on June 04, 2009 (boomark / email).