Google Squared: The perfect search tool if you like inaccurate spreadsheets

June 3, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments |

Google just released a new search tool to the public called Google Squared, which pulls information about a specific topic from around the web into a spreadsheet. First announced at Google’s Searchology event in May, Squared could be useful for different kinds of research — if you want to buy a new dog, it can help you compare breeds, or if you’re writing a school paper about the solar system, Squared can create a chart of all the planets and their attributes. Currently, Squared is a Labs product, meaning that it’s still in testing. I found it both promising and hilariously unreliable.

Other writers have already complained about the weirdness of some results. My favorite search so far is for “newspapers.” As expected, given the broadness of the search, Squared returned a rather random collection of publications. More inexplicable, however, were the fields of information it provided: In addition to offering each paper’s image and description, Squared also provided their “Justice,” “Pakistan,” and “Games.” (It turns out that The Monitor’s “game” is Bionic Commando, and The Nation’s “justice” is Alien vs. Predator. Will someone please tell me what that means?)

On the other hand, Squared tends to do better for more specific searches. For example, it returned a somewhat accurate list of the novels of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (though it mixed movies in with the books and seemed to think that the novels had “directors,” not “authors”). Or to return to my earlier example, the spreadsheet of San Francisco newspapers was much more accurate than the more general query for “newspaper”.

You can add rows and columns to the spreadsheet as desired. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which are the two local newspapers I actually read, weren’t on the list, but I can add them as rows, and then save the results. Also, Google attributes each fact to another source on the web, so users can determine their reliability.

For now, Squared seems strong on concept, strong on user interface, and weak on search results. Um . . . two out of three isn’t bad, right?

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Miramon
    Squared is just godawful and should never have been released to the public. If it was not a labs toy it would be a worse embarrassment than Cuil. The columns are just never right, and clearly have no semantic basis whatsoever.

    I'm guessing that for any query the system extracts random entities from a single site's text, and makes columns out of that; and then of course it generally turns out that all the other sites looked at don't have any of those kind of entities, so most of the columns are almost always blank, and usually have ludicrously bad headings in any event.

    This is a poster-child example why you can't use the same tool for every job. Emergence of meaningful results from vast amounts of data is the Google hallmark, but it just fails badly in this case. This is one of those problems that seem to be AI-hard, or at least to require a strong AI approach.

    Wolfram Alpha uses handcrafted curated solutions to special problem categories, which makes it less than generally useful, but it still works sometimes on some things. Google Squared, using its data-intensive but zero-AI approach, is useful even less of the time, which is really an amazing achievement in its way.
  • Obviously, I'm not quite as down on Squared as you are, but this is still a wonderful bit of invective.
  • nairsats
    Google Squared appears to be similar to my patent application:

    Frankly, I am getting a Déjà vu effect while going through the “Google Squared” application because it appears to be very similar in function to my United States patent application which was filed on April 12, 2007 and as publicly disclosed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 16, 2008, when the patent application was published.

    My patent application is titled as “Method And System For Research Using Computer Based Simultaneous Comparison And Contrasting Of A Multiplicity Of Subjects Having Specific Attributes Within Specific Contexts” bearing Document Number “20080256023” and Inventor name “Nair Satheesh” which may be viewed at http://patft.uspto.gov/ upon Patent Applications: Quick Search.

    Google Squared appears to be using at least some if not many of the same methods and systems as set forth by me more than two years ago in my patent application. In fact there are many more methods and systems disclosed in my patent application which I believe will help resolve certain inaccuracies found in current Google Squared application.

    I have issued legal notices to Google through my Patent Attorney in the US but Google has not responded yet to any of my notices.