Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Google Squared – View search results in spreadsheet format

Posted: 04 Jun 2009 03:16 AM PDT

There's been a lot of search engine news lately, starting with the release of the much hyped Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that aims to give you a direct answer to certain types of questions.

Google has been working on a product called Google Squared, which is aimed to kill off competition from the likes of Wolfram Alpha. So what is this mysterious new tool from Google?

Google Squared is basically Google's way to take unstructured data on the web, combine it, manipulate it, and spit it out in a nice spreadsheet format for you to analyze to delights end!

It's an experimental search engine, but it's quite powerful and pretty cool. It basically breaks down search results into categories that you can then use to organize the data.

Let me give you a quick example so you can see what Google Squared can do. Type in "Nissan" and this is what you get:

Google searches the Internet and presents you with a table of Nissan cars, such as the Datusn, Pathfinder, Altima, etc. It also includes a couple of columns such as the model year, width and length.

You might find the width and length a little useless, so you can click inside the Add columns text box and choose from other column suggestions such as wheelbase, transmission, and succeeded by.

Pretty sweet eh? But that's not all! Maybe I don't care about wheelbase and transmission, but instead want to know about the price! Type in Price into the box and you'll get a list of suggestions, such as TMV Price, Local Dealer Price, and Market Price! Sweet!

Add all of them to your table and here's what you get:

Other than the $34.95 price for a Datsun, every other price seems possible. The Altima is between $19K and $27K, the Pathfinder is between $25K and $37K, etc.

But you might be asking yourself, "Well that's great, but it's only 10 cars and there are way more Nissan cars!". True. For some reason, Google Squared does not list out all of the possibilities it finds and I'm not sure why.

Nevertheless, you can click Add next 10 items and it'll keep adding on more Nissan cars.

Overall, it's a pretty neat way to get an answer to a question that requires some sort of comparison. Trying to use Google Squared to fix a Windows problem is not going to yield very good results.

However, type in Microsoft Windows and you get a nice little table of the operating systems, Windows programs, etc.

Take it for a spin and see how you like it! The web is changing fast and we'll soon be able to get more data faster and better organized than ever before. Enjoy!