Google Squared goes live

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Posted on 4 Jun 2009 at 08:20

Google has released a beta version of its answer to Wolfram Alpha, Google Squared.

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The new service collates factual information on specific topics into a spreadsheet-like grid. A search for US presidents, for example, displays a grid revealing the names, pictures, descriptions, dates of birth and other details of the White House custodians.

Extra columns can be added to the grid, either using Google's suggested topics (such as Religion for the US presidents) or your own selection (we added "wife" to our grid of presidents and it managed to name the spouse of most of the leaders).

It's also possible to manually add extra items to the grids. Our initial spreadsheet of US presidents didn't contain Ronald Reagan, for example, but we simply typed his name into the Add Item box at the foot of the table and he was automatically added to the grid.

Unlike a regular spreadsheet, there's currently no way to sort the data. So, for example, on our list of US presidents, there's no means of ordering the list by date of birth or number of terms served.

Users can create grids on any topic they like, although the accuracy of the information begins to wane when you veer away from Google's suggested topics.

A search for "British PC manufacturers" returned results for Hatchards the bookshop, which it bizarrely claimed was located in Afghanistan, and Dollond & Aitchison the opticians. In fact, there wasn't a single PC manufacturer on the list.

A search for British Prime Ministers fared much better, although when we manually added John Major to the list, the spreadsheet pegged his "date of death" as 1982 - eight years before he took office. To the best of our knowledge, Sir John is also still alive and kicking.

Squared is equally comfortable with popular culture as it is with historical data. Our search for "Tom Hanks films" produced a grid of movies starring the actor, with most of the film stats seemingly harvested from the Internet Movie Database.

Google admits that Squared is "by no means perfect". "While gathering facts from across the internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it's far more difficult for computers to do automatically," claims Alex Komoroske, associate product manager for Google Squared. "Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge."

Google Squared has a long way to go before it can compete with Wolfram Alpha for accuracy. But unlike Wolfram, it's not taking its data from a relatively narrow set of predefined data that's been entered into its database - it's grabbing data from the internet at large, and on the whole, doing a pretty decent job of it.

Click here to try Google Squared and give us your feedback on comments below.

Author: Barry Collins