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.
Google Squared developers are quite welcome to join my fantasy baseball team next year.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Google turned on Google Squared Wednesday, letting the public test out its attempt to present search results in grid format.
Google Squared was first demonstrated at Google's Searchology event in May, when the company showed off how a query for a category such as "U.S. Presidents" would return a number of results for the gentlemen who have held that office sorted by categories, such as political party, number of terms in office, years in office, as well as any number of customized categories.
This is very much a Google Labs project, far from a complete part of the Google search experience, and early experiments left a lot to be desired. Google Squared finds Web pages that have been indexed, just like with a regular search, but presents them in a spreadsheet format that, if the data was relevant, could potentially be more useful to someone doing research on a particular topic.
For example, take a subject where reams of statistical and historical data can be found on the Internet: baseball.
Google Squared was unable to return any results for "New York Mets third basemen," which was admittedly a joke query on my part based on the fact that the Mets are notorious for having a revolving door at the third base position over their 47-year history; I thought that would produce a long list of names. When I widened the query to just "third basemen," Google Squared came up with the names of seven baseball players who have occupied that position, several of whom are or were prominent players (Matt Williams, Terry Pendleton, and current Mets third baseman David Wright), and one who none of the baseball fans in the office could recall (Ken Reitz).
The search produced results for several relevant categories, such as a description of the player, date of birth, and whether they batted left or right. But when I tried to suggest additional categories, such as "All-Star," it was only able to find one appearance in the All-Star game by David Wright, missing appearances by Terry Pendleton and Robin Ventura.
Likewise, Google Squared suggested "Batting Average" as an additional category, but failed to return any results. That's a statistic that can be easily found on the Web for any player, living or dead, with a regular Google search.
A simpler search for just "baseball teams" produced several current Major League Baseball teams, but also helpfully provided the schedule for this year's Williamette University Bearcats squad, which finished the regular season with a 21-17 record.
But when a product was entered into Google Squared, the technology showed its promise, such as in this list of search results for "Nikon" that lists several different models of Nikon digital cameras along with specifications and features. Search Engine Land also noted helpful results for a search on "U2 albums."
Google's not trying to pretend this technology is ready for prime time, and with good reason: lots of refinements will be needed to turn it into a useful tool. Let us know how your experiments with Google Squared turn out.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google introduced three new enhancements to its search engine Tuesday, giving searchers new ways to filter results and adding new types of data to the search results themselves.
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and experience, led a parade of the company's product managers on stage at Searchology 2009 to demonstrate the new features, known as Google Search Options, Google Squared, and Rich Snippets. Search Options will be rolling out gradually on Tuesday, giving searchers ways to filter their results based on factors like timeliness, result type such as image or videos, or a desire to see search results in visual form.
The announcements "center around how can you find more, and what can you do with it," Mayer said. Google last held a Searchology event in 2007, when it introduced Universal Search, blending regular search results with images, video, and news results.
Building on Universal Search, Mayer and Nundu Janakiram, an associate product manager, showed how Search Options allows users searching for information on the Hubble Telescope, for example, to filter their results with a "Show Options" link at the very top of the search results page. Clicking on that link brings up a new page with a list of options on the side, somewhat akin to the current Google News user interface.
By opting for the most recent information on the space telescope, the subject of a current NASA mission, users will be given a mix of news and blog results. If they prefer, they can click a filter that will sort those stories with images pulled from those stories.
Other options include new ways to visualize search results, such as the News Timeline introduced last month, as well as something called Wonder Wheel that visually represents data as rays of a star spreading out from the center of a search result.
Google Squared is the newest addition to Google Labs. This project allows searchers to create a spreadsheet based on Web results. Users can filter the data accessed through the Google Squared search, request additional categories to create a custom spreadsheet with the results that matter the most to them, and even fact-check the results by accessing the source of the data as well as alternate sources.
The other enhancement discussed Tuesday is called Rich Snippets, which is a partnership between Google and certain publishers, including CNET, to display information from Web pages within the box that encompasses a search result. Google is backing open standards called RDFa markup and Microformats markup that allow Web publishers to highlight aspects of their Web page to show in the search results.
Rich Snippets is a partnership between Google and certain publishers, including CNET, to display information from Web pages within the box that encompasses a search result.
(Credit: CNET)The CNET example used in the presentation displayed the number of stars assigned by a CNET reviewer to a GPS device in the search results for a particular product. Likewise, Yelp's user-generated restaurant ratings will show up in the search result for a certain restaurant.
The feature is closely related to Yahoo's SearchMonkey, which the Google rival released a year ago. SearchMonkey allows outside developers to create their own SearchMonkey extensions to spotlight content, but to try to encourage use by more publishers, Yahoo has been working to make SearchMonkey easier to use.
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