Google Squared gets more data, better filters

Google Squared is still having trouble with accuracy, despite new enhancements released Friday.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Google has released a few enhancements to Google Squared, its attempt to build spreadsheets out of search results.

Google Squared is a Google Labs project first unveiled in May at its Searchology event and set loose on the world a month later. The idea is to take the search results for a given query, such as "U.S. presidents" or "European countries," and present the results as a table with facts and dates helpfully sorted for easier research.

The company announced on Friday "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," it said in a blog post. For example, Google Squared can now return 120 facts organized in rows and columns, as opposed to just 30 at launch. The filters have gotten better as well, which was a definite problem with the first batch of Google Squared results.

It's still not ready for prime time, however: according to Google Squared, the Milwaukee Brewers play home games in both Milwaukee and San Diego. It had no idea what city is home to Yankee Stadium--let alone which New York borough--and it also seemed to miss the grand opening this year of a new Yankee Stadium to replace The House That Ruth Built.

Google said Squared is an experiment in "understanding structured data from across the Web to build new tools for organizing and presenting information." Despite plans to offload its back-end search technology, Yahoo is trying to keep its name in the game as a search company by conducting much of the same research.