14 DAY TRIAL // More of Google Labs' casualties are becoming known. Among them are a couple of related search tools, Google Squared and the older Google Sets. Both these tools dealt with structured data and organizing data sets gathered from the chaos that is the web.
That said, the tools probably got very little usage on their own and the useful technology behind them has already been incorporated in Google Search.
Google Squared in particular serves as test tool for new algorithms and ideas, but there doesn't seem to have been many improvements in the couple of years it's been around.
Google Squared was released in 2009, to some fanfare. The tool was designed to surface data from the web, in a way that has grouped relevant information together.
The tool retrieved a data table for any query, which would offer different type of information, characteristics and so on, depending on the subject of the query.
It got some updates early one, but Google later started incorporating some of the technology and the features into its main search site.
For example, it started using technology from Squared to surface answers from the web to natural language questions. It was also used for simple questions that had direct answers, which are displayed in the search results page.
Google Squared is also used to power features like Something Different in Google Search, which lists topics that are linked to the query, but not identical.
Another use is for Top References, a feature that displays a list of items relevant to your query, for example when searching for French cities, Greek philosophers and so on.
Alas, Google Squared itself is getting shut down on September 5. What's more, Google Sets, a tool that retrieves a list of items based on two or three examples, is also getting the axe on the same day. Google Sets is somewhat of a precursor to Squared.