Google Squared—An Internet Search Spreadsheet?

Lifehacker reports on a new experimental Google feature called Google Squared. They compare it to Wolfram Alpha but Wolfram Alpha is more of a mathematical information engine than a real search engine and Google Squared is more of a comparison engine. In fact, Google's demo video shows a comparison between hybrid cars. I couldn't help but think about Google Shopping which also allows you to make comparisons, in this case between products. Google Squared may eventually evolve into a complement to Google Shopping by allowing people to narrow down their choices before looking for the best price on a final product. 

Trying various searches was an interesting exercise. Google's suggested use, comparing hybrid cars is a pretty good one of Google Squared's potential as it finds a wide variety of cars and allows you tweak the search nicely, easily finding prices, fuel economy (MPG) ratings, and hybrid models that don't appear on the grid at first. Searching for a less environmentally correct type of car yields decent but clearly inferior results. (At one point, Google Squared actually displayed an MPG rating of 100 MPG for a Hummer H3 thanks to this blog post. A pop up list of possible alternative values which were labeled as "low conficence" lead to this Wikipedia page which displays fuel economy ratings for American cars which I would have thought would be regarded as fairly accurate considering how heavily Google Squared relies on Wikipedia for its information.) Similarly, a search for Atom powered netbooks yields decent results but has trouble finding prices for them.

I thought that Google Squared might be good for comparing politicians based on their stances on issues but that didn't work out quite so well. Searching for "Illinois congressmen," Google accurately found and displayed information about current and former Illinois congress people. But trying to add information on their stances on an issue such as a abortion or immigration yielded no information. Similarly searching for a specific piece of legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act yielded no information. Searching by that bill's ID number (H.R. 1409) in the House database also yielded no results even though putting that number into Google normal search box finds it immediately. Curiously, inputting the word "liberal" does yield rankings for some of them based on a Wikipedia article on RINOs (Republicans who are considered "Republican in name only" because they not conservative enough for the party "base").

For all its flaws, Google Squared shows great potential as a comparison tool. It's no alternative to Wolfram Alpha (which is still in its infancy and defies easy categorization). But Lifehacker also compared it to a spreadsheet and on this they are spot on. Google Squared is just begging to be integrated into Google Docs and might even be better off being absorbed into them as an analysis tool.

New Extension Puts Wolfram Alpha's Peanut Butter in Google's Chocolate

Lifehacker links to an experimental Firefox extension which inserts answers from Wolfram Alpha into your Google searches. While Wolfram Alpha hasn't exactly set the Internet on fire, it does provide an interesting results when your questions have a mathematical slant. Because of this, Wolfram Alpha is less an alternative to an Internet search engine and more of a complement. That's the beauty of this extension. This add-on makes the Google page a bit too wide for my netbook's small screen but it should look nice on PCs with higher resolution screens. It should make a good addition to your search arsenal.

Wolfram Alpha—For Times When Google Isn't Nerdy Enough

There has been some talk about a new search engine called Wolfram Alpha. Well, the search engine with the name of a Joss Whedon villain is finally public and it puts a decidedly different spin on Internet search than Google. Whereas Google will return a list of links for your search query, Wolfram Alpha treats it as a question and tries to supply answers to it. "Big deal," you say. "Ask Jeeves did that years ago and it sucked." Actually, Wolfram Alpha is very different in the way it supplies answers. Wolfram Alpha takes a strong mathematical/analytical bent. A quick query of this search engine using my birthdate tells me that among other things, I was born on a Saturday and that the moon was in a waxing gibbous phase. I also told that Bradley Schlozman, a politician whom I've never heard of and that Brian Stepanek, an actor whose name I find vaguely familiar share my birthdate.

Searching Google for the same date told me no such thing. For one thing, Google doesn't seem to recognize my dirthdate as a date. Instead it returns a lot of links of documents which have the numbers in my birthdate but don't necessarily correspond to that specific date. It also shows a Google Calculator equation showing that my birthdate adds up to -71. On the other hand typing the word "Buffy" into Wolfram Alpha returns nothing while Google returns numerous links full of information relating to Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. In a similar vein, putting the word "pants" into Wolfram Alpha just returns a definition and some interesting ways to display synonyms for that word while Google returns numerous links ranging from where to buy pants to pictures of pants. It begins with a Wikipedia article on the history of trousers and includes a link to something called "No Pants Day" which encourages people to not wear pants on the first Friday of May.

Moving on to more mathematical ground which is supposed to be Wolfram Alpha's strength has more interesting results that show off the relative strengths of both search engines. A search query for "2000 census" on Wolfram Alpha shows some nice graphs and tables of world population data. On Google, the results are more U.S. centric beginning with U.S. government's census website. It also includes a huge list of links to census data from various sources.

While it seems impossible for Wolfram Alpha to match the richness of Google's results, this new search engine seems more interested in finding a niche of providing quick answers to specific mathematical questions. While Google wants to rule the world, Wolfram Alpha has set its sights on a small group of nerdy researchers.