14 DAY TRIAL // Structured data is seen as the next best thing in online search. Well, that and real-time data and social media. In any case, while Google is looking to make its results more real-time, it's also focusing on organizing all of the information online, structuring and labeling it. Google Squared was launched several months ago, mostly to counter the threat of Wolfram Alpha, but Google kept mostly quiet about the project until today, when it announced a major update.
“Today we're launching 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,” Noah Weiss, associate product manager, and Randy Brown, software engineer, wrote. “[T]he 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 [a] 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.”
Google Squared tries a new approach to web search and information discovery. Instead of presenting the user with links to what it believes are the most relevant web pages, the search engine gathers the data relevant to the query from several sources across the web and then presents it in a structured way that should be meaningful to the user. Sounds good in theory, but, in practice, both Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha, which has a similar goal, have a long way to go.
Google's answer presents the data in squares, hence the name, but at launch it could only handle 30 squares per query. That number has now been increased to 120 distributed between the columns and the rows as it sees fit, depending on the data. Google says the data and the accuracy of the results are better, but, for most searches, it still has a lot of work before becoming reliable. Still, Squared now actively filters items and attributes that don't return enough data compared with the other entries. There is also the possibility to sort the results by column and to export the results to Google Spreadsheets. This last feature could prove very useful, but, until the quality of the results is reliable enough, there are not that many cases where it could be used to get any actual work done.