The quality of the information is also better, because we're ranking based on both relevance to your query and whether we can find high quality facts. For example, in the past we would show you a column for "First Lady" even if the column only included a couple accurate names. Now we're actively filtering out items (rows) and attributes (columns) from the initial square if we haven't found enough accurate data. Perhaps more interesting, we built Squared to learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone.
In addition to improving the information in Squared results, we've also added the ability to sort columns, so you can rank, group and compare items. Squared will even convert units in the background to make sure the data is sorted properly. For example:
We've also added the ability to export data from Squared to a
Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file, which should make it easier to do interesting things with the data. For example, you can build a square for [
african countries], add more items and columns, and examine the relationship between the literacy rate and GDP per capita. Once you've built your square to contain all the information you need, you can export the square to Google Spreadsheets and
create a rough scatter plot:
There's a lot left to do before Squared is ready to leave Labs — we're still working on improving quality as well as the user interface — but we hope that our recent improvements make it more useful. In its experimental stage, Squared demonstrates an important future direction in search: understanding structured data from across the web to build new tools for organizing and presenting information. Try it out, and
let us know what you think.
Posted by Noah Weiss, Associate Product Manager, and Randy Brown, Software Engineer
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