I’ve been spending the last few days fooling around with Google Squared, the search giant’s experimental attempt to generate structured results, and for the most part I’d consider myself cautiously optimistic. Now, Google has made it clear that Squared is still in pretty early stages. The logo has a nice big “Labs” title slapped on it, complete with green beaker. The blog post introducing the product to the public stated that Squared is experimental and that “this technology is by no means perfect” and is merely a first step. There’s no question that Google doesn’t think this product is ready for prime time. It’s just opening up the lab so we can see the nifty stuff that’s starting to form.
Which is why I’m already getting annoyed by the stories pointing out how funny it is that Google Squared has declared the current Russian president dead or that President Obama passed away in 1982. Oh, Prince William kicked the bucket, too. And Google Squared apparently hates conservatives. It’s probably only a matter of time before the mainstream press picks up on a potentially offensive result and multiple organizations scream with feigned outrage.
For those who haven’t been keeping up with it, Squared is a fairly major departure for Google that could eventually change the way we look up data on the web. If you run a query for “dogs“, rather than present a list of pages relevant to canines as the ‘normal’ Google would, Squared attempts to generate a spreadsheet of dog breeds, complete with their average height, weight, and country of origin. As with Wolfram Alpha, another structured data search engine, it’s very cool when it works — it just doesn’t work all that often.
Anyone who has used Squared for more than two minutes knows that it messes up quite a bit. I think you’d be hard pressed to search more than a few queries in a row that didn’t result in clearly incorrect facts or glaring omissions. Many of the service’s initial reviews pointed this out, and for good reason. We’ve all seen the goofs. But at this point honing in on a poor result just feels mean spirited and lazy.
The alternative is for Google to restrict access to Squared until it does work consistently, which could be years, if ever. What Google is doing here is pretty gutsy, and the fact that they’re letting us play with it when it’s still half-baked makes it even more so. So let’s take Squared for what it is, and (hopefully) help it grow into something powerful rather than harp on its self-admitted flaws.
I can’t they let this go public with some many inaccurate queries. They should have kept it under wraps for a bit longer.
believe… (can’t believe) – good proofing reading prior to submission
Goog is doing good job in “understanding” search. That is considers duplicate webpages like &ref=abc and &ref=xyz as same, and also wikipedia redirect pages as same page – unlike yahoo.
Another small but not insignificant improvement is quote search in goog news.
They should not have even released something this bad.
If they were positioning this as the search engine of the future then I’d agree. But I see this as more of a neat toy that could evolve into something special.
Can you integrate this with Twitter?
I like your attitude Jason.
Anyone who has followed Google even through a couple products would know very well that releasing beta products is the culture of Google. Google does not believe in shying away from criticism (so in that case, bring on all these goofs) rather in having skeletal idea and letting users use it and perfect the product over time. Google would not have so many tools and features if Google engineers did not have the freedom to put our their ideas.
This is a beautiful idea. If people respect the ingenuity behind it, it will become more awesome than my left testicle.
Couldn’t agree more with Jason’s conclusions about Google Squared. It’s a work in progress and it’s great that Google is putting it out there to test out. It’s a whole new way of using search that I don’t think anybody, including myself is used to. I know that it’s coming up with some factual inaccuracies but it’s ability to make contextual relationships seems a bit uncanny. I conducted a search with it last night entering only the names of my 5 favorite bloggers in an attempt to find some more like minded thinkers to follow. It came back with a list of 50 tech though leaders, some of which I had heard of, some of which I had not. The point is it worked and worked better than anything I’ve ever seen. I discovered some great thinkers that I’m now following on FriendFeed and it’s all due to Squared. I guess it’s like anything else and depends on what you’re using it for.
Hilarious damage control. TechCrunch’s own Erin Schlockfeld was proclaiming how Google Squared would crush Wolfram Alpha. Now that everybody sees what a steaming pile of crap it is, it’s suddenly “more of a neat toy.”
Comedy, thy name is TechCrunch.
Actually, Erick made it pretty clear in his post that Squared was still very experimental. I think his ‘crushed’ title had more of a long term outlook. In other words, Google wasn’t going to take Wolfram sitting down.
Looking at the joke results Google Squared returns, I’d say Google took it bending over.
Labs are for experimenting. Also, we would all be worse off if Google and others held up projects until they were perfect. One, because the world would be less fun, two, because they wouldn’t get road test important technologies until they were polished to perfection. The result would be less innovation since you can’t do that with too many projects because it is too expensive. This is a great way to find out if a project is worth a hill of beans or not before blowing wads of cash and time on it. Stockholders rejoice.
Why don’t we congratulate Google instead for keeping some of the small company spirit this kind of risk taking indicates, and for sharing with us these projects very early in their development cycle? They should also be congratulated for being willing to suffer the possible embarrassment of early disclosure instead of hiding behind a wall of unrealistic perfectionism.
Agreed.
If you want something fully baked, head to your closest Panera and stuff it.
If you want to play with the latest and greatest [1] you head over to Google Labs.
[1] on big scale infrastructure that is
Google squared has been introduced in a very deliberate experimental fashion. It may be that Google wants an answer to a simple question. “What search queries will people want structured information on ?” The answer to this question will enable them to improve the product .
Google squared has been introduced in a very deliberate experimental fashion. It may be that Google wants an answer to a simple question. “What search queries will people want structured information on ?” The answer to this question will enable them to improve the product .
Sorry, forgot to add great post! Can’t wait to see your next post!
WHAT?! Wolfram Alpha works very very very well. Maybe you should polish your ways of input queries? Works for the rest of us….
At it’s heart, Google Squared allows you to generate a list of search results in the left hand column and then run multiple “atrribute of” style searches for each of those results automatically.
It’s quite simple to do this in a more deliberate way using Google spreadsheets and the =googlelookup and =import formulae. That is, you can use different lookups to create your own grids that look up information either from google, or from data sources that you have defined.
I’ve posted a couple of demos at:
“Is Google Squared Just a Neatly Packaged and Generalised =googlelookup Array?”
[ http://ouseful....lelookup-array/ ]
and
“Using Google Spreadsheets and Viz API Queries to Roll Your Own Data Rich Version of Google Squared on Steroids (Almost…)” [
http://ouseful....teroids-almost/ ]
and as a result think that I can actually see quite a rich future for this style of data search.
Jason,
I get the point that it’s still in Google labs, but exactly how are we supposed to make it a better product if we DON’T point out the flaws we find?
If they had called it “google find related dog breeds” then I would say you had a valid point. But to complain that people shouldn’t actually try and test a product that is in beta, and then comment on what they find, is absurd.
By your logic, no one should ever comment negatively on anything beta, early release, or in current development. Good luck with that.
99% of Google’s revenue comes from AdWords, and the inventor and patent holder of the original system has filed the largest patent infringement case in United States history against Google as he alleges Google copied the system from in in the fall of 2000. The patent was applied for in 1999. Since the inventor filed the case in Federal Court in New York, Google has changed their maximum price system, which shows they admit they infringe. For more details look up Desenberg v Google or oneredpill.com.
Google is desperate to come up with other revenue models as their fraud is coming to an end. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Sorry, but the idea of adwords is obvious, and has been reinvented by many people, well before 1999. If that goes to court, the patent will be thrown out, and prior art will be shown.
Patents were created to protect physical inventions that took time to develop. While copyright was created to protect written works. It makes no sense to apply both to software, when copyright is just file.
Just because you came up with an idea does not mean jack. Your idea is in-turn made up of many other people’s ideas. Where would you be if they were as stingy as you?
You have to actually implement something before it is worth anything!
You are mistaken about everyone knowing adwords and it getting thrown out. The invention has an impact like e=mc2, and obviously you dont understand why AdWords works, and how it works. It works based on a maximum price. The patent won’t get thrown out, and you don’t have experience in IP nor in AdWords to understand what is going on. There is nothing obvious about AdWords. Did you ever code the first maximum price system in Java or another language? Why don’t you write the system from scratch, and then come back to me and tell its “obvious”. No one else ever “thought up” AdWords before it was invented. In fact it was copied, and it was never “thought up” by anyone else. Do you know how AdWords works? Do you understand the Maximum Price real time pricing mechanism? Do u understand that Google’s poor implementation of my invention causes over $3 billion of fraud per year, and do you understand why? You need a lot of education about AdWords, it seems.
I disagree.
They rushed out this product to generate some news flow and to deflect attention from Bing’s success.
Big mistake by Google. This product is very poor.
They need to step back and rethink this before ‘releasing’ more flawed products.
Ivan
I agree. They first announced it to counter Wolfram Alpha’s launch and they release it completely unbaked as Bing launches.
This behavior looks more cynical and paranoid than innovative.
Google also has a self-created problem in keeping things like Beta tags on old apps like Gmail and even Maps and Google finance had it for the longest time.
Sure this was “Labs” instead of “Beta”, but has Google ever released to the public anything this inaccurate in its search product lineup with so much fanfare?
work in progress? It’s just a piece of work. Releasing things into public view just because it’s some cultural habit is a joke of an excuse for releasing things that are so completely flawed. It’s just another way to grab headlines during the release and cause a buzz. Link bait. That’s all Google Squared is.
Sadly soon after they took off the Beta label Finance stopped working properly with Chrome!! If you refresh a stock page in Chrome your charts disappear, whereas in FF and IE the charts stay put. Kinda makes you wonder. Now you need to manually clear your cache in Chrome to get the chart back. It has made me switch back to FF actually, which is too bad since I love Chrome, but it just isn’t functional playing with Finance in my recent experience.
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.