Google Squared – Searches in Grids

Seems Google is taking the fight to Bing! Or maybe not! Given that this was announced more than a month ago…

Google’s new new search ‘tool’ (or call it toy) – Google Squared went live in the Google Labs yesterday and at first sight, seems a nifty way to categorize information. To quote their own help pages:

Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.

• Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes.
• Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you’re interested in.
• See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
• Save and share Squares with others.

So what they do is restructure the search results into neat little grids or squares, each with its own category & label. And the user can add/remove the necessary rows and columns and when they do so, Google automatically gets that information (if available) and populates the squares. One can add as many items or columns in one’s search and what’s more, can also save them for future reference. But of course, the information should be available on the web for Google to retrieve in the first place.

To illustrate that, I’ve saved myself a neat square for Hyderabad. Go to Google Squared and type in Hyderabad. The areas by popularity (or search results) will be listed out as items, with few attributes as columns. I chose to add items that included areas/places of my interest and also changed the columns to show the attributes that I needed and voila! Again, information I desired, but was not available on the www (like population or nearest chemist, for example) will not show up in the grids. Check out the image after the jump…