At Google’s Searchology event today, the company discussed a new feature coming soon to Google Labs. It’s called Google Squared and will apparently pull unstructured data right from the web and put it into spreadsheets.
From the sound of it, you can search for something and receive a list of info that relates to that query.
Danny Sullivan liveblogging the event says they showed a “search for ‘small dogs’ and results are listed in rows and columns, things like Jack Russell Terrier, its weight, type of dog group, and under it a Maltese.” He shows some screenshots from the presentation, but they’re hard to make anything out.
“What if Google gets the ‘messy’ data from the web wrong? Hover over a cell, and you’ll see the source with more info and the other sources for that value. You can also edit the information and save to your own personal account,” writes Sullivan.
According to Claudine Beaumont with Telegraph.co.uk, this will be rolled out across the whole search engine at some point. “Unlike Wolfram Alpha, it scans the entire web, rather than just a database, for its results,” she says.
She points to an example of a search for “London boroughs,” which would list all boroughs alphabetically, along with relevant links and info about populations and that kind of thing.
Results will be organized in lists, but users will be able to remove information they don’t want to see. You can evidently also add different columns.
The feature is supposed to be launched within the next several weeks, so be on the look out for that. At that point, we can get a better sense of what all you can do with it. Look for at at google.com/squared when it goes live. In the meantime, you can still play around with the new “show options” feature in Google search results.
