Google Squared smoothed out

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 13 Oct 2009 at 08:09

Google Squared has received an overhaul as the company looks to improve the quantity and quality of the search results the service returns.

Squared is Google's answer to Wolfram Alpha and collates factual information from various web pages, such as the names of British royals or Victorian authors, into a grid.

In the original incarnation this grid could house up to 30 squares, each equating to one fact about the search subject, the President's wife's name, for example. This has now been bolstered to 120, theoretically allowing it to present a much wider range of information.

Google also claims to have found a better way of sifting the information it presents.

The quality of the information is also better, because we're ranking based on both relevance to your query and whether we can find high quality facts

"The quality of the information is also better, because we're ranking based on both relevance to your query and whether we can find high quality facts. For example, in the past we would show you a column for 'First Lady' even if the column only included a couple accurate names," the company reports in its blog.

"Now we're actively filtering out items (rows) and attributes (columns) from the initial square if we haven't found enough accurate data. Perhaps more interesting, we built Squared to learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone," it concludes.

The search giant has also added the ability to export data from Google Squared to Docs, or as a CSV file.

Despite the improvements it's clear from even a few minutes playing with the service that it still has a long way to go. While searching for Victorian authors produced an admirable list of results, it was stumped when trying to add their notable works to the list.

And Bizarrely, searching for 'British royals' now returns even fewer and less accurate results than it did originally. Back when we tried the search in June it as least found Prince William (though it claimed he had died in 1972) and Prince Michael of Kent (died 1942, apparently).

Trying the same search now simply lists Jester and Black Rod, with nary a royal in sight.