Over the years Google has come to realise that some search queries performed on their search engine cannot be answered on a single page or even by a few web pages found in their results and that some actually require nearer twenty pages to find all the answers that the user is looking for.
For instance if you were looking for a particular service, rules to a game or a product then you could perform a search and quite easily find these answers on a single website.
However some queries are not as simple as that and require a number of different resources, which means having to visit multiple sites to find the answers that you are looking for.
If you needed to find information on the planets for example, such as size, density, distance from the sun and length of orbit etc. then this may require visiting many different websites to find all of these facts.
However, as previously rumoured, Google has invented and now launched its new technology ‘Google Squared’, which is an experimental search tool that collects all the relevant information needed from across the web and presents it in a spreadsheet style grid.
With Google Squared you can simply enter in the word ‘planets’, for example, into the query box and Google will collate all the information that it sees as useful, into a consolidated, easy to digest ‘square’.
Gathering information from across the web can be a very tedious and laborious process for humans, although it is rather simple, however for computers it is a lot more complicated and Google Squared in the first step at solving this issue.
However the tool does come with it’s faults and cannot be expected to return the exact facts that the user is looking for, so it has therefore been designed so that users can adjust the results accordingly to enable them to find exactly what they are looking for.
For instance using the previous example, ‘planets’, the square that is returned is as follows:
However if you wanted to know the distance each one is from the sun, the surface temperature or the number of moons each one has then you can simply add these titles to the columns in the grid and Google will retrieve the relevant information. There is also the option to remove columns that are not needed.
By simply clicking on a particular fact the user can also be shown other possible values found via other sources and can therefore change the entry in a particular cell and also compare the facts from the different sources to see the variations. Google even labels particular facts in this list to show their confidence in the source to warn users that the data may not be completely accurate.
The sources of where the fact have been retrieved from are also easily accessible, as the user also has the option to see other sources from the same site and also can visit the site in question by clicking on the URL of the page that is specified with each source.
All these features mean that each square is totally versatile, with the option to add and also remove any columns or rows that are not needed. This means that users can create their perfect square with all the relevant information that they require then they can simply save their square and return to it at a later date.
So why not give it a try yourself at http://www.google.com/squared?
