14 DAY TRIAL // Google Squared is turning one today. The experimental search engine made its debut in Google Labs a year ago, the first step in trying to make sense of all the data scattered around the web. It was an interesting approach and the technology showed promise, but it clearly wasn’t ready for the big time. A lot has changed in a year and the technology’s ability to understand the web has gotten better, so much so that Google is introducing a couple of features based on Squared to the main search engine.
“In the past week, we’ve introduced two features that bring parts of Squared’s technology directly to regular search results. The first provides better answers to fact-finding queries like [independence day of india], and the second is 'something different,' a special kind of search refinement in our new left-hand panel,” John Provine, technical lead at Google, wrote.
The first feature should help out with simple questions that have straight answers. Rather than providing several web pages that may contain the information and leaving it to the users to sift through the results and then through the content on the page to get to what they need, they can get the answer in a matter of seconds or less.
The short answer shows up on top of the regular results and is based on information Google has gathered from around the web. You can see the sources that the search engine used so you can go to any of the original web pages. This feature has started rolling out across English versions of the site, but it won’t be available to everyone until the end of the week.
The second feature is something different, literally. Providing related searches has become common place and Google lists in the left siderbar topics that may be related to the query for certain searches. But, now, Google is introducing “Something different” results, queries that may be part of the same topic, but are not strictly, or morphologically, related. As Google exemplifies, searching for “zebras” will list things like “giraffes,” “hippos” or “rhinos.” The feature is available now for the English versions of Google.
Both of these features rely on Squared’s ability to ‘understand‘ the content Google indexes and the queries. Understanding natural language is one of the biggest challenges for any search engine and any progress on this front brings us closer to a breakthrough. But that’s only part of the equation, the other is structuring the vast amounts of data found online in a way that makes sense to machines. As the technology behind Squared advances, expect Google to get a lot ‘smarter.‘
