Google squared has been launched. Google Squared is a modified search which gives you factual results in the form of a spreadsheet for the query you feed it. Data is fetched from different sources and you can see the source by hovering on the square you are curious about. You can save you query if you are signed in to your google account for future use and reference.
How is it different from regular Google search?
Suppose you want to search for the countries and may be even do a comparative study of different countries in the world. If you do a regular google search, you will be be presented with 72,600,000 results, but does that solve your purpose if you also want some additional facts like area, population, currency etc of each of the country? You will need to manually go to “n” number of web sites/pages to get all the information across different parameters you want about all the countries. And if you are planning to do a comparative study, god help you. If you want to prepare a even a small list of, say the 20 most populated countries of the world, you have a hell of a task ahead of you.
Google Squared does all that work you wanted for you, i.e. collects all the facts you want on one page, and in a single click. You have all the countries (theoretically), all the facts (you can add parameters which you want, we will come back to that later in this post) about the countries. You can prepare your lists based on the facts, do a comparative studies or anything you want with the data.
Lets take the same example of the query “list of countries“.
As you can see, Google squared gives much more factual information about your query than the normal google search. Here is the screenshot for Google Squared result page for “list of countries”.
As you can see it gives you a much more detailed factual information about your query and saves you huge amount of time as you don’t need to scan through the archives to get the information.
What more you can do is, remove unwanted details/data/squares from the results page, like if you don’t want “suffrage”, “president”, “image” or any field, you can simply remove it by clicking the “X” icon on top right part of that square to refine your search. In the same way, if you want more information and it wasn’t listed originally, you can add your parameter in the “add column” field and you will have the data for that field as well.
Lets add a few parameters to our original search “list of countries”. Say I want to know “currency”, “population”, “area”, “GDP” for each country. I will simply add the fields and bingo, we have all the information we need! Magical isn’t?
Have a look at this screenshot with modified parameters.
Magical, isn’t?
How many clicks and more importantly, time does that save you?
Features missing in Google Squared:
- We could really use ability to sort the results in a given column. The results are displayed currently in a haphazard way and not sorted by any order. Sorting, would further help in creating lists in ascending order, according to our needs. Suppose if we could sort “countries” column alphabetically, we can get list of countries in alphabetical (or reverse alphabetical) order. Or sorting “population”, or”GDP” fields can give us “list of most populated countries” or “list of richest countries” in ascending or descending order. That will make much more sense.
Limitation here is that it is not feasible to sort (feasible = sensible) every field/ column. How do you plan to plan to sort “description” column and at the same time make some sense out of the new results. The results would still be the same, haphazard and nonsensical. - We would really love to export our results in a spreadsheet format say .XLS , .XLSX, .CSV, .ODS (Open Document Sheet). That way we can continue using our work offline. Downside, well kids will stop doing their home work as they will get much of the stuff done by google.
Is it perfect or at least a great Google product??
It is really a great idea for sure, and can save the user a lot of time. But the area where it disappoints is exactly where you want it to work. Google squared will mostly come in handy for factual searches. And facts are something which don’t change so you can’t afford any inacurate information.
Well have a look at this result page for the query “India presidents”.
Now first of all, “ustad” Zakir Hussain has NEVER been the president of India! The name there is correct but picture and description are not! Google squared has mixed up two distinctly popular Indian personalities. One was the president of India and the other “is” a great tabla (a musical instrument) player. the data in “succeeded by” field is also not correct.
This is not one isolated query. There are many more. I am sure you will be able to find a few your self. The algorithm needs some serious look-in.
Verdict: Google Squared is a great idea, has all the potential to become a success but it is not reliable, at least not at the moment. It is good, but not perfect. If there is any google product I am not happy or impressed with, it has to be Google squared.
So kids, do not rely on Google squared for your home work, you may get bad grades, atleast for now, wait for it to get better!
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seriously!! Google squared just generates a blank table for most of the search queries.. I understand that its in the testing stages, but come-on!! Wolfram-Aplha is so much better!!