San Francisco — While Microsoft’s Bing is busy banging its new decision engine and Wolfram Alpha attempting to lure users with its computational prowess, search engine giant Google, released an experimental new search product publicly on Wednesday called “Google Squared”.
Google Squared was first previewed back in May, at Google’s Searchology event, is “an experimental search tool that culls informations from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet,” where the company displayed off how a query for a category such as “U.S. Presidents” would return a number of results for the gentlemen who have held that office sorted by categories, such as political party, number of terms in office, years in office, as well as any number of customized categories.
Google Squared does not present a list of links to Web pages, as is the case with its traditional Google search, but provides information derived from a query in a spreadsheet-like grid called a “square”.
Google Squared is basically a Google Lab project, which is by far under testing takes a category (like US presidents, roller coasters, or digital cameras) and attempts to build a starter “square” of facts, if the data was relevant, could potentially be more useful to someone doing research on a particular topic.
For example, take a subject where reams of statistical and historical data can be found on the Internet: baseball.
Google Squared, when queried for “third basemen,” Google Squared returned the names of seven baseball players who have occupied that position, several of whom are or were prominent players (Matt Williams, Terry Pendleton, and current Mets third baseman David Wright), and one who none of the baseball fans in the office could recall (Ken Reitz).
Users of google.com/squared can modify their squares by removing rows and columns they do not like, or by adding new rows and columns. Google Squared will attempt to fetch relevant facts.
“Verify and correct the facts in your square by exploring original sources and investigating other possible values,” Google explains on the Google Squared Labs page. “If you are happy with your square you can save it and come back to it later. Google Squared does the grunt work for you, making research fast and easy.”
In a blog post on Wednesday, Google said Google Squared could be useful when a user needs to make multiple searches to find the information they want.
“It essentially searches the Web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way,” Google said.
The Mountain View, California-based Internet search giant cautioned that Google Squared remains experimental and the technology behind it “is by no means perfect.”
Here is how it looks in practice: