Google turns searches into spreadsheets

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 13 May 2009 at 08:04

Google will automatically generate detailed spreadsheets of data from search terms as part of a revamp of its market-leading service.

Dubbed Google Squared, the forthcoming feature will deliver tables full of factual data on the topics people search for.

A search for "small dog" for instance, will generate a table that lists different breeds, along with their weight and height.

The service could be seen as a shot across the bow of Wolfram Alpha, the so-called "computational knowledge engine" that delivers hard facts about search terms. (See Jon Honeyball's column in this month's PC Pro - on sale tomorrow - for more on Wolfram Alpha).

Google Squared will be available later this month from the company's Labs site.

Search Options

In the meantime, the company has made some immediate improvements to the live search site.

Search Options, which now appear at the top of results pages, allow users to apply filters to their results to further narrow down their search.

Results can be filtered by the type of content (video, forum or reviews) or date, allowing users to narrow down results to pages created within the last day, week or year.

A new, cheesily named Wonder Wheel feature also provides a graphic representation of related searches. The "PC Pro" Wonder Wheel, for example, provides links to our sister publications, such as Computer Shopper and Micro Mart.

Detailed snippets

Google is also introducing what it calls "rich snippets", which essentially involves squeezing more information into the preview text that appears under search results.

These enhanced snippets could include details such as the rating of a laptop review, or the laptops's price and specs.

Google is asking web publishers to place RDFa markup and Microformats tags in their HTML so that it can extract this rich data for search results.