Google wants the searching population to forget about Bing and focus on its latest product: Squared.
Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the Web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If users search for roller coasters, for example, Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.
“Some information is easy to find. If you want to learn the rules of golf, you can search Google for ‘golf rules’ and we’ll return a list of relevant Web sites right at the top,” said Alex Komoroske, an associate product manager for Google Squared. “But not all your information needs are that simple. Some questions can be more complex, requiring you to visit 10, perhaps 20, Web sites to research and collect what you need.”
Search Gets Smarter
Continuing with the roller-coaster theme, Komoroske drills down into Google Squared’s value compared to the market leader’s traditional search box. In the past, Komoroske said he has used Google to search for information about roller coasters, such as which ones are the tallest, fastest and have the most loops.
“Finding this information used to take multiple searches — I’d find roller-coaster sizes on one Web site, heights on another, and speeds on a third. By manually comparing the sites, I could get the information I was looking for, but it took some time,” Komoroske said. “With Google Squared, a new feature just released in Google Labs, I can find my roller-coaster facts almost instantly.”
Komoroske pointed to the technology behind Google Squared. While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy for humans to do, he said, it’s far more difficult for computers to do automatically. He called Google Squared a…