Google Squared is Live: Who Knew Structured Data Could Be So Unhelpful?
Three weeks ago Google demonstrated a new product in Labs called Google Squared; it's a search engine that creates structured data from big piles of information and lets users compare various things by their attributes. There have been suggestions that Google Squared will crush Wolfram Alpha. Well, Google Squared went live today and while it's a great idea, in reality the service doesn't look very useful. It doesn't look like it's going to crush anyone.
The user interface is inflexible, the data is odd looking and it's hard to imagine using Squared regularly. It's a great idea but we'll see where it goes.
Check out this example below, a Square for the search "dog breeds." It's cool that you can add major or minor medical concerns to the list of columns, but the selection of examples is really strange. The Labrador Retriever (surely the most common dog in this country) doesn't appear until you click through the #47 on the list and German Shepherds aren't in the top 50. Call it structured data if you like, I call it a surefire recipe for making a bad dog buying decision.
All the other queries we tried were similarly "almost helpful." The dog breed example is actually unusually good. Sorting by a particular column isn't possible, when I define a content type you don't get to see it unless I share it with you, and the user experience is an off mix of intriguing and maddening. The description fields would benefit from borrowing the first few lines of a Wikipedia article on a topic.
It is very impressive that when you request a square for a concept Google is unfamiliar with, you're prompted to offer up to five examples and then it goes out and builds the data set for you! Unfortunately, when I tried to explain to Squared who some examples of "tech bloggers" were it brought back a terrible picture of me and said that CNet's Caroline McCarthy is sixty four years old. I'm pretty sure that's not true.
We're as excited as anyone about the future of creating structured data from the sea of information online, but Google Squared isn't very inspiring so far. We've been looking forward to it since interviewing Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google, about Squared. When the day comes that you can slap a .xml or .csv to the end of one of these Squared URLs and pull out data programatically, that will be impressive.
Here's our review of Wolfram Alpha, which we said was likely to be a good service for engineers but not for anyone else. Hopefully it's still early days for all of these kinds of tools.
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I thought the sort ordering was pretty strange as well. I tried to US Holidays, then UK Holidays & AU Holidays. There was no consistency to the sort on them and the list seemed incomplete.
I do, however, think it could become a pretty incredible access point for volumes of data. Imagine if you could look at global population statistics by city. I could see this working pretty well in that respect. The ability to "create new squares" is pretty interesting as well. It looks like these are some kind of logical extension of knols.
One big delta versus Wolfram Alpha is the degree to which people create or augment data vs the machine doing all the awesomeness. How often will people be going in and updating the dog breed stats? Will that become something that happens automagically? For all squares?
Google Squared is no good on the query 'lesbians'
I think it's great. Also you can save your SQUARES, so you can use it to index your own searches. I believe that it will add more and more results to a square once more and more people add them to theirs; like page rank.
Keep it going big G!
"Ger, lesbians are very important so I appreciate your pointing that out. Was it famous ones, issues faced by lesbians, or hot ones that you were seeking to compare in a square? I hope that Google will resolve this shortcoming in its data set promptly."
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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June 3, 2009 1:51 PM
Ger, lesbians are very important so I appreciate your pointing that out. Was it famous ones, issues faced by lesbians, or hot ones that you were seeking to compare in a square? I hope that Google will resolve this shortcoming in its data set promptly.
@Marshall - you write as though there are no famous, hot lesbians facing issues. On behalf of the community, we are offended. Lesbians are *always* offended.
;)
I just realized, when a cell text is gray, it means that google has low confidence in it. You cannot change the result of any cell, just add columns or items.
I queried for "Philadelphia Flyers Roster" - it returned the right names but the bio for defenseman Randy Jones was for the cowboy from the Village People who happens to have the same name. :)
All guests can view and edit only what workspace managers grant them access to. where
Well, I'm just very impressed with results given in tabular form. Finally... I mean, we've been waiting for this for years. Adding a column is just like adding an attribute in a SPARQL query. Google can draw from Freebase and other linked data sources, while adding its own statistical search results on top. I agree there is room for improvement but I really believe we should see such improvement pretty quickly.
Seems interesting enough although I have to agree that this does not look like it will be that useful in day to day use. I wonder what the audience is for this one anyways...
http://pressplaysolutions.com/
I think Squared is a great start. If you think something is missing, like German Shepard, you can manually add a row for that and it automatically fills in the grid for you. Having some of the info editable for correction is a must though. If you are doing research it's great to have it fill out as much as possible for you, but for anything missing or incorrect, a user needs to be able to change the info.
I did a search for programming languages and it said Pascal died in Paris, France. Not too far from the truth.
My immediate complaint is the same one I often have. When I make queries on just about any topic in medieval history, the results are dominated by Wikipedia. Google is its own victim here and Google Squared is victimized squared.
Folks, this is in no way shape or form related to wolfram and should not be compared to it. The idea that it was google's answer to wolfram was cooked up by a speculative blogger and is entirely off the mark.
Wolfram is hitting databases compiled specifically for research built by the company whereas squared is hitting the web.
Obviously it's going to be a bit fubar in the results as it's a labs launch but I think it has legs. According to the faq it learns from your edits to the table, so in theory the results will get cleaned up over time...
I think it's great. I wonder what the audience is for this one anyways
i dont think its doing a good job, i just searched for iphone and it didnt give me anything. you would think it could find something on iphone
I like the idea of creating structured data from the internet information where the users are allowed to organize and categorized. It my not work well at present time but once they market in well, it will be unstoppable trends.
I think you are getting it all wrong.
The usefulness of structured data relies on its ability to fuel other applications which require this data.
Google squared may not be the grounf breaking by it self, but you could build a ground breaking application on top of it
The best approach may be to use a combination of human and automated intelligence. That's what we're exploring at Noodle Squares. Compare:
Search engines
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=search+engines
http://noodlesquares.com/SearchEngines.html
Cameras
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=cameras
http://noodlesquares.com/Cameras.html
It found no hippie towns until I provided a few examples, then it found a whole lot of them.
Did it infer from the number of dogs in example towns?
Try "programming languages" - you will not be impressed.
I completely disagree. Do you think Wolfram|Alpha can give you a proper result (for query "Tech bloggers")? NO they cant. even if they will you can not go to the source and verify that how authentic that number is.
Wolfram|Alpha is build for human (they are not mash-up friendly). When its for human then in that case Google square is much more practical way to do it.
the daschund lobby gets their way again.
hmmmmm..... maybe they shoulda called it Google Squared BETA? hmmmmm....... :P
IMHO Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared are BOTH over hyped experiments that do not live up to their at all.
Wolfram Alpha seems to be slanted towards being a stock/financial research reference tool (B-oOorring).
Are these tools supposed to grow and "learn" and improve? Currently, the results are far more often Newton-esque unintended comedy.
@Noodle Squares: the combination you're talking about certainly looks worth exploring. I wish you the best success, but am afraid you'll have to face tough competition from Google Square.
Yes, structured data and tabular results are starting to catch on, e.g. razorbase.com is Google Squares for the Linked Data web, hopefully we'll see many more of these from the big players
Personally, I like my first impression of Google Squared. Try looking up "US Presidents". No, it is not perfect, but it is better than anything else I have used.
You can also try something like "Texas cities". Interesting results. I also hit "New York City Hotels". Much better for comparison purposes than regular Google, of course not as good as Travelocity. But for concepts without websites devoted to them, it is pretty good.
Hopefully, Google will begin using the Linked Data (e.g. RDFa) they're harvesting to improve this service. Here is a redo of the 'dog breed' example using linked data browser. Note the increase in utility when the data is linked.
Who Knew Structured Data Could Be So Unhelpful?
The user interface is inflexible, Sony VGP-BPL2C the data is odd looking and it's hard to imagine using Squared regularly. It's a great idea but we'll see where it goes.
I try the Google Structured date and found that it is unhelpful as live bing.com
Read the recent paper from Google: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data". And other one called "WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web". Google Squared is just a simple example of what these new approaches can do...
What a perplexing tool. Thanks for pointing it out. Not sure how much business intelligence I can derive from it...
This is not structured data, this is data forced willy-nilly into a spreadsheet format. Most interesting data does not fit this straight-jacket mold. Most interesting data has relationships between items, such as "barack obama" lives-in "white house", is-married-to "michelle obama", was-born-in "hawaii", etc. The tool also finds some really nonsensical data, like saying that Craig Newmark is the owner of Yahoo! search engine ;) Who knew.
We could not find this on China google lab. Hope we can see and test this as soon as possible.
You can of course construct your own data search grid in Google spreadsheets, eg "Using Google Spreadsheets and Viz API Queries to Roll Your Own Data Rich Version of Google Squared on Steroids (Almost…)"
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/using-google-spreadsheets-and-viz-api-queries-to-roll-your-own-data-rich-version-of-google-squared-on-steroids-almost/
Tony, thank you for an address.
In fact I am really disppointed by GSquarred.
It should have been : "your search results put in smart table"
But it is only : a strong selection of only ONE ROW by item put in a smart table.
So where a google search results in thousands of rows, a GSquarred frequently gives five or ten !
And no easy way to get these missing rows.
The main GSquarred rule should be : Do not loose any rows, only improve their organization.
The work that is done is great and so it is a pitty to restrain the final result like this.
I can easyly imagine that GSquarred choose certains rows as representative of the item showed. But let give us access to all the other rows coresponding to the same Item. Maybe by clicking a '+' button...
I do this writing because I am a Google fan and I really think that this big default could be changed esyly.
Google Squared is Live: Who Knew Structured Data Could be So Unhelpful http://bit.ly/LwOrv [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2020593816]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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June 10, 2009 3:55 PM
Excellent post! I had some doubts on google squared but after reading your post it is clear. Thanks!
Google Squared takes a category and creates a starter 'square' of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web.sony vgp-bps9
i agree with a lot of the other comments here. Really erroneous data a lot of the time. Would trust even wiki a hang of a lot more for 'actual' facts!
In fact I am really disppointed by GSquarred.
It should have been : "your search results put in smart table"
But it is only : a strong selection of only ONE ROW by item put in a smart table.
So where a google search results in thousands of rows, a GSquarred frequently gives five or ten
All the other queries we tried were similarly "almost helpful."Dell Inspiron 6000 battery The dog breed example is actually unusually good. Sorting by a particular column isn't possible, when I define a content type you don't get to see it unless I share it with you, and the user experience is an off mix of intriguing and maddening. The description fields would benefit from borrowing the first few lines of a Wikipedia article on a topic.
It is very impressive that when you request a square for a concept Google is unfamiliar with, ."Inspiron 6000 battery you're prompted to offer up to five examples and then it goes out and builds the data set for you! Unfortunately, when I tried to explain to Squared who some examples of "tech bloggers" were it brought back a terrible picture of me and said that CNet's Caroline McCarthy is sixty four years old.."Inspiron 6000 I'm pretty sure that's not true.
Google Squared appears to be similar to my patent application:
Frankly, I am getting a Déjà vu effect while going through the “Google Squared” application because it appears to be very similar in function to my United States patent application which was filed on April 12, 2007 and as publicly disclosed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 16, 2008, when the patent application was published.
My patent application is titled as “Method And System For Research Using Computer Based Simultaneous Comparison And Contrasting Of A Multiplicity Of Subjects Having Specific Attributes Within Specific Contexts” bearing Document Number “20080256023” and Inventor name “Nair Satheesh” which may be viewed at http://patft.uspto.gov/ upon Patent Applications: Quick Search.
Google Squared appears to be using at least some if not many of the same methods and systems as set forth by me more than two years ago in my patent application. In fact there are many more methods and systems disclosed in my patent application which I believe will help resolve certain inaccuracies found in current Google Squared application.
I have issued legal notices to Google through my Patent Attorney in the US but Google has not responded yet to any of my notices.
France. Not too far from the truth.
This doesn't surprise me. It will take a quantum leap to improve search.
I think its good that Google go public with these new projects but so long as they don't sell it as something that it isn't already then that's fine.
"I think its good that Google go public with these new projects but so long as they don't sell it as something that it isn't already then that's fine."
That I agree!