Google Squared

Posted by De Web Times in Industry News on 06 4th, 2009 | no responses | 1,116 views

Three weeks ago Google demonstrated a new product in Labs called Google Squared; it’s a search engine that creates structured data from big piles of information and lets users compare various things by their attributes. There have been suggestions that Google Squared will crush Wolfram Alpha. Well, Google Squared went live today and while it’s a great idea, in reality the service doesn’t look very useful. It doesn’t look like it’s going to crush anyone.

The user interface is inflexible, the data is odd looking and it’s hard to imagine using Squared regularly. It’s a great idea but we’ll see where it goes.

Check out this example below, a Square for the search “dog breeds.” It’s cool that you can add major or minor medical concerns to the list of columns, but the selection of examples is really strange. The Labrador Retriever (surely the most common dog in this country) doesn’t appear until you click through the #47 on the list and German Shepherds aren’t in the top 50. Call it structured data if you like, I call it a surefire recipe for making a bad dog buying decision.