'Google Squared' Search Tool from Google

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At Google’s Searchology event in May, Google announced the impending arrival of Google Squared, a Labs project that would return search results in spreadsheet form. And finally Google Squared is released today. Google Squared does not provide a list of links to Web pages, like with a traditional Google search, but presents information derived from a query in a spreadsheet-like grid called a "square."While many were first hailing it as the Google-killer, in reality it’s too different from the latter to be a direct competitor. Even so, the Mountain View-based company isn't taking any chances and it's come up with its own structured search engine, Google Squared.

one of the new subfeatures of Google Search Options is "Wonder Wheel," which represents a search term graphically as a wheel hub, with "spokes" of related topics branching off from it. Google's Universal Search has also been gaining traction, with the company saying one in four search results now triggers the utility, which displays video, image and other search engine results in addition to traditional Web pages.Users of google.com/squared can then build, modify and refine their "square" through further Web searches. "If there's another row or column you'd like to see, you can add it and Google Squared will automatically attempt to fetch and fill in the relevant facts for you.

As you remove rows and columns you don't like, Google Squared will get a fresh idea of what you're interested in and suggest new rows and columns to add," Google wrote at the company's blog.Google said,"It essentially searches the Web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way."The tool has been developed for those queries which are more complex and require users to visit several websites to research and collect relevant information.

Since Google Squared is just your search results in column and row form, you’re best off making queries on groups of things. So, you can search for television shows and get back a list of shows, accompanying images, descriptions, language, and run time in a format that’s much easier to consume than typical search results. You can add additional columns and Google will try to help you fill in the blanks.Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic -- instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet.

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.Mayer also discussed Google Squared, another search application due to roll out through Google Labs by the beginning of June. It shares features with Microsoft's new search engine Bing in that it has topical search results spread by categories but it is in fact much more like Wolfram Alpha. Like it, Google Squared's results give users facts and data on a query and not just links to web pages.

But the main difference is that, unlike Wolfram Alpha, it doesn't store the information in an internal database and doesn't analyze it either. It just structures the data already available online.Designed to take "unstructured information and present it in a structured way," the application will take information gathered from a search and use it to create a customized table. Within this spreadsheet-style display, Google will sort more detailed information about the search term. Google's demo showed how a search for "small dogs" created a table that listed information such as size and breeds.

This type of technology has obvious applications for many types of targeted searches, including product search, health search, scientific searches, you name it. There are dozens of semantic search startups trying to impose structure on the Web to perform similar tricks.Google Squared is massively enhances the search experience by bringing relevant results forward much more quickly and enabling people to quickly sort through and introduce new data as if on a spreadsheet. It effectively removes search layers, significantly improving the user experience by rapidly surfacing what they need to see.

The Mountain View, California-based Internet search giant cautioned that Google Squared remains experimental and the technology behind it "is by no means perfect."You can remove items you don't need and you can also add columns and items with other information that you might find useful and it will automatically retrieve that info as well.

Google maintains a comfortable market-share lead in the search engine arena, with 63.7 percent of the market, according to research company ComScore. In March, Americans used Google sites for some 9.1 billion searches, compared with 2.9 billion using Yahoo search and 1.2 billion using Microsoft search.Google Squared is in a very early stage of development so some searches might prove more useful than others but it's bound to get better in time and, in fact, the columns and items you add or remove will help the search engine give a better answer next time.