A close encounter with Google Squared

Stephen Withers
Friday, 05 June 2009 05:08

Opinion and Analysis

The population figures looked about right, though strangely Google Squared was unable to find a value for Perth. That's odd, because it can be found in the Wikipedia paragraph following the one used in the Description cell.

But things fell apart in the Area column. That's understandable, as different sources will deliver numbers for cities with and without their surrounding metropolitan areas.

But Perth's area was said to be "Perth and Kinross" (every other entry in this column was numeric) and the value for Hobart applied to Hobart Township, USA.

Melbourne sounded a little small at 1.9 sq km, but that turned out to be the area of East Melbourne. And 75 sq km is the area of the electoral division of Adelaide, not the city or its metro area.

The good thing about Google Squared is that it reveals the sources of the data it presents and - at least with numeric values - usually provides some alternatives. But in my trial, there seemed to be little intelligence in the selection of that data. Even though the Description column had correctly homed in on Perth, Western Australia, the four choices for Area were limited to Perth, Scotland, and Perth Amboy, USA.

Even though offers to search for more values, clicking on that link merely performs a Google search in a new window, with no apparent way of incorporating the selected data into the Square.

If you have (or are prepared to open) a Google account you can save your Squares for later use.

Anyway, Google Squared clearly has a lot of potential, but for now you can easily see why it comes under the Google Labs banner rather than being described a beta.

At this stage Google Squared is worth a look, but you wouldn't want to rely on it. With a bit more development, it could prove very useful as a way of quickly assembling tabular data - especially if the result could be moved into a Google Docs spreadsheet for further manipulation.