Google launches "Squared" experimental search tool

The company's answer to Wolfram Alpha

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4 June 2009 17:03 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Internet giant Google has recently been faced with a few upstarts in the search area, namely Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft's "Bing", both of which attempt to categorise results, rather than just providing a list of links.

While we at Pocket-lint aren't convinced that anything can unseat Google in the short-term, evidently the company is a little bit rattled because it has announced a new experimental search engine called Google Squared.

Google Squared attempts to collect facts from the web and present them in a spreadsheet, rather than the traditional big-list-of-links. It crawls the web and attempts to extract comparable information then sticks it all in a table.

You can click on facts to see the sources that they were acquired from, as well as a list of other possible values. You can customise columns, adding and subtracting them, and then save them for future use.

It's not perfect - a search for "small animals" reveals two results; "Rabbits" and "Garlic". But other searches (Google suggests "planets" and "rollercoasters") do better. Give it a try, build some squares and share your results with us.

Via: googleblog.blogspot.com

Full tags

Software, Online, Google, Search engines