Google Labs Offers Table-Based Search Results

blackbearnh writes "Google just released Google Squared into the Google Labs playground. Google Squared lets you get results back in row and column format, and then add more columns to the result set. There's a brief tour of the features over on O'Reilly Radar, where the judgement is that there's lots of rough edges, but a huge amount of potential, especially for quick and dirty table generation for reports."

Comments

E=MC^2

[Celeste R]

It doesn't take an Einstein to find out that this is good for researching things. It certainly beats going through all of the connecting websites to get to the juicy details.

Re:E=MC^2

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad about its accuracy though.

Yup. I tested it out with a search on operating systems, and there are a number of hilarious misses within the results.

For Windows, it's apparently under a free license, and it's date of birth looks like Google scraped the drop boxes for a sign-up form rather than getting the actual creation date of Windows.

For Linux, it was a bit off course and grabbed a description of Ubuntu, instead. It lists the current version as 2.1 which doesn't make sense for either Ubuntu (9.04) or the Linux kernel (2.6.29.4 or 2.6.30-rc8). I suspect it grabbed the version of a random Linux app.

Darwin resulted in the biggest miss, as one might suspect. It grabbed the biography and birthday of Charles Darwin.

First thoughts

[unfasten]

My first thoughts after trying a few of the example searches on the main page are that it seems to be aimed a bit at Wolfram Alpha. It isn't as broad as Wolfram Alpha but it is focused on giving back data sets instead of a list of search results.

Already better that Alpha

[Lord Byron II]

In fifteen seconds of playing around with it, I already feel like I'm able to get better data and have better control than I do with Wolfram Alpha.

Re:Already better that Alpha

[Gulthek]

No data analysis! GS and WA are completely different beasts.

In Google Squared:

Try getting a square with the five largest countries by area. (In Wolfram|Alpha search for five largest countries by area)

Try to mathematically manipulate results like, say, dividing power usage of the united states by its population. (In Wolfram|Alpha search for united states electric production / population

Try to get GS to do anything like growth charts, ISS location calculations, morse code translation, puzzle solving, food calorie counting, differential equations.

Also the data is much less complete. Check out Google Squared's results for the escape velocities of the moons of Mars. Now check Wolfram|Alpha's. Yeah, there's a reason that WA is citable as a primary source.

Re:Bible Books

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=bible+books Who knew Esther was a babe?

Uh, the thing that stuck out at me from that list was that the book of Revelations is apparently published by Ubisoft and is preceded by the book of Devastation. How did it determine that? Why, Wikipedia's list of Xbox games, of course! I don't recall that book of the Bible from the Catholic Masses I attended as a child but it sounds pretty bitching.

If someone made games out of the books of the Bible, I'd definitely hit up Revelations (and not that Left Behind crap) but I'd assume books like Psalms and Job would be a grind :/

Re:Useful for brainstorming

[Celeste R]

Unfortunately, it's not quite there for random brainstorming. It's geared toward easy fact generation. The "human" factor is almost completely removed, image linking to entries in the table is inaccurate at best (search "Planets" and you'll find Pluto the dog), and so on.

I can see that this is a useful tool for people like say... engineers, who need to know a material's composition and properties (facts, again), but this tool is limited by the supporting databases.

Take, for example, the fact that I can search for a consumer product, but I can't get much more than generic information.

Links are difficult to follow, it takes more effort than needed to go somewhere. Brainstorming is easier with the vanilla Google.

Yes, this is a useful tool, but it doesn't compare very well to Wolfram Alpha; this is a spreadsheet data generation tool, where Alpha is an analysis tool.

Mixed results

[gaspyy]

The default result sets are more than useless - are laughable.
I searched for europe demographics and it automatically created a set of rows that was made of Gibraltar, Isle of Man and Faroe Islands; for columns it created Image, Description, Language, Capital and Currency. The same search on Wolfram Alpha produced clear, concise results.

Eventually, I could get good results on Squared too by starting with an empty square and adding rows and columns myself. Took about 10 minutes; I could have made a simple search to get the same results.

I realize Google-bashing is dangerous around here, but they definitely have to improve Squared if they want it to be useful.