Google Squared Now Live in Beta

Google Squared has officially entered the picture and is now available to test out. The premise of the search is that it offers a neat and tidy table of results for your search term. The results include a variety of facts and attributes pulled from the web. Essentially, it’s an attempt to weed through the gigantic aggregate of information on the web and provide you with all the information that you need on the search term–kind of like when you find the perfect website that contains exhaustive information about your topic, only without having to visit 20 individual websites on your own.

Seeing that today is the first day of the NBA Finals, I started with some basketball terms. The results were perplexing.  When searching for “basketball” some random things like “beach basketball” and “deaf basketball” were at the top of my chart. The columns contained things like “Flat Stomach” ?? and “Wikipedia”. Not surprisingly, many of the individual boxes came up as “No Value Found”. “NBA” fared better in that it provided a list of teams. The columns included “Location”, which makes sense and “Date”, which doesn’t, since each date was in a different format, and most were 2009 values. You can also add in your own columns to access additional information not initially covered and click on the individual boxes to get the source.

If Google Squared ever works accurately as envisioned, it’ll be huge for students and those looking for trivial information on a subject, basically allowing them to research the entire subject by clicking a button. Check it out for yourself and see how it fares with terms that you’re interested in. [PC World and Google Blog]