Google Labs Offers Table-Based Search Results 165
blackbearnh writes "Google just released Google Squared into the Google Labs playground. Google Squared lets you get results back in row and column format, and then add more columns to the result set. There's a brief tour of the features over on O'Reilly Radar, where the judgement is that there's lots of rough edges, but a huge amount of potential, especially for quick and dirty table generation for reports."
E=MC^2 (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't take an Einstein to find out that this is good for researching things. It certainly beats going through all of the connecting websites to get to the juicy details.
First thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)
Already better that Alpha (Score:5, Interesting)
In fifteen seconds of playing around with it, I already feel like I'm able to get better data and have better control than I do with Wolfram Alpha.
Re:Bible Books (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=bible+books [google.com] Who knew Esther was a babe?
Uh, the thing that stuck out at me from that list was that the book of Revelations is apparently published by Ubisoft and is preceded by the book of Devastation. How did it determine that? Why, Wikipedia's list of Xbox games, of course! I don't recall that book of the Bible from the Catholic Masses I attended as a child but it sounds pretty bitching.
:/
If someone made games out of the books of the Bible, I'd definitely hit up Revelations (and not that Left Behind crap) but I'd assume books like Psalms and Job would be a grind
wikipedia (Score:1, Interesting)
it sure provides a ton of information from wikipedia. i wonder what % of wikipedia articles form google's results these days.
Re:Useful for brainstorming (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it's not quite there for random brainstorming. It's geared toward easy fact generation. The "human" factor is almost completely removed, image linking to entries in the table is inaccurate at best (search "Planets" and you'll find Pluto the dog), and so on.
I can see that this is a useful tool for people like say... engineers, who need to know a material's composition and properties (facts, again), but this tool is limited by the supporting databases.
Take, for example, the fact that I can search for a consumer product, but I can't get much more than generic information.
Links are difficult to follow, it takes more effort than needed to go somewhere. Brainstorming is easier with the vanilla Google.
Yes, this is a useful tool, but it doesn't compare very well to Wolfram Alpha; this is a spreadsheet data generation tool, where Alpha is an analysis tool.
Re:How it works (Score:2, Interesting)
If the column 'types' were known a priori then this wouldn't be that neat, however if its classifying on the fly what columns are to be used then that's pretty cool. Looks like a really nice large scale application of 'wrapper induction'.
How the columns are determined is the impressive and novel bit tbh.
Mixed results (Score:5, Interesting)
The default result sets are more than useless - are laughable.
I searched for europe demographics [google.com] and it automatically created a set of rows that was made of Gibraltar, Isle of Man and Faroe Islands; for columns it created Image, Description, Language, Capital and Currency. The same search on Wolfram Alpha [wolframalpha.com] produced clear, concise results.
Eventually, I could get good results on Squared too by starting with an empty square and adding rows and columns myself. Took about 10 minutes; I could have made a simple search to get the same results.
I realize Google-bashing is dangerous around here, but they definitely have to improve Squared if they want it to be useful.
Re:Already better that Alpha (Score:3, Interesting)
The major downside being that this can only do the equivalent of "vs" searches in Wolfram Alpha; i.e. it can't calculate with the information at all. That and the sources often being dubios at best.
Spider Man = Monkey (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=monkeys [google.com]
I never knew!
Re:Already better that Alpha (Score:5, Interesting)
No data analysis! GS and WA are completely different beasts.
In Google Squared:
Try getting a square with the five largest countries by area. (In Wolfram|Alpha search for five largest countries by area [wolframalpha.com])
Try to mathematically manipulate results like, say, dividing power usage of the united states by its population. (In Wolfram|Alpha search for united states electric production / population [wolframalpha.com]
Try to get GS to do anything like growth charts, ISS location calculations, morse code translation, puzzle solving, food calorie counting, differential equations.
Also the data is much less complete. Check out Google Squared's results for the escape velocities of the moons of Mars [google.com]. Now check Wolfram|Alpha's [wolframalpha.com]. Yeah, there's a reason that WA is citable as a primary source.
Re:Already better that Alpha (Score:1, Interesting)
The neat part is that, if you search for geniuses, you can add a column IQ, and get the corresponding value for this person.
It really look promising.
Re:E=MC^2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bad about its accuracy though.
Yup. I tested it out with a search on operating systems [google.com], and there are a number of hilarious misses within the results.
For Windows, it's apparently under a free license, and it's date of birth looks like Google scraped the drop boxes for a sign-up form rather than getting the actual creation date of Windows.
For Linux, it was a bit off course and grabbed a description of Ubuntu, instead. It lists the current version as 2.1 which doesn't make sense for either Ubuntu (9.04) or the Linux kernel (2.6.29.4 or 2.6.30-rc8). I suspect it grabbed the version of a random Linux app.
Darwin resulted in the biggest miss, as one might suspect. It grabbed the biography and birthday of Charles Darwin.
Re:How it works (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, now this is interesting. Compare a regular google search of "black cat" to the Google squared one. The Google squared one pulled a whole slew of Manga results, which is not the dominant search in regular Google. That tells me that Google pulls the first X pages and tries to find pages with some sort of commonality. "Black cat" fireworks was a unique page, so that one got tossed, because there was no commonality. The Manga pages was the first one with a lot of pages on the same general topic.
Ordering algorithm for rows? (Score:3, Interesting)
#1 is Spock (the Zachary Quinto version, but OK good)
Kirk however is #6 after Riker, Troi, Picard, and Neelix.
Neelix? c'mon google, that's a fail.
Re:E=MC^2 (Score:3, Interesting)
They have a long way to go then as it seems to provide some awfully terrible results. Like check this one out for Roller coasters [google.com].
Apparently there's a roller coaster named GhostRider, it has a length of 4,533 ft, height of 118 ft, and it travels past the speed of sound at 1038 mph!!
I think I'll just stick to the basic Google search using quotes, +'s, -'s, AND's and OR's.
Re:It May Source Wikipedia... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's Google Squared, not plain Google. If you search for something the results of which cannot be reasonably be put into a table of things and facts about them, you're not likely to get good results. A lot of people don't seem to be catching onto this. For example, in TFA, the guy searches for "atomic weights of elements", gets results which are half elements and half things like "Melting point", which have nonsense columns that are empty in most cases, and then has to add an "atomic weight" column anyway (he didn't explicitly state this, but the column in his picture is all lowercase, and the ones Google adds aren't like that). The right way to use it is to search for just "elements" and then add an "atomic weight" column to that. Doing it this way gets only actual elements, and default columns that make sense ("Boiling Point", "Melting Point", and "Crystal System" for me) and have information for every row.