A close encounter with Google Squared

Stephen Withers
Friday, 05 June 2009 04:08

Opinion and Analysis

Google Squared is supposed to collect and organise facts that can be found on the Web. But does it deliver on this promise?

There's clearly some commonality between Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha, in that they're both intended to deliver a set of information assembled from multiple web sources.

With Alpha, you get what you get (though you can apply mathematical operators to the results); Google Squared presents the results in spreadsheet form and lets you add or remove rows and columns.

But as Alex Komoroske, associate product manager for Google Squared admits, the technology behind squared "is by no means perfect."

As an example, I tried building a Square to display some basic facts about Australian capital cities. Squared realised that I was talking about places in Australia for most of them, but even though Darwin was the last on my list (which you might expect to provide some sort of context), the information I got related to naturalist Charles Darwin, not the Northern Territory city.

The texts selected for the automatically-generated Description column mostly came from Wikipedia, and were not always very useful. Adelaide and Brisbane fared quite well (eg "Brisbane (pronounced /ˈbrɪzbÉn/) is the state capital of the Australian state of Queensland and is the largest city in that state").

The texts for Melbourne, Perth and Sydney were little more than disambiguations, eg "This article is about the metropolitan area in Australia. For the local government area, see City of Sydney. For other uses, see Sydney (disambiguation)."

Given the high ranking that Google gives to Wikipedia, it isn't surprising that data from it often appears in Squares. The exceptions can be very surprising, though.

Hobart's description presented a copyright notice from a company in the food service industry, while Canberra's comprised press release headlines from a company of that name in the nuclear measurement industry.

What about the numbers? Please read on.