Google have, today, released what looks like a very interesting product in Google Squared which is an extension to the search engine that tabulates your search results. Interesting because it presents results in a structured format that I assume one may, one day, be able to consume in any manner of ways (more on that in a minute).
Here’s an example, the results of a Google Squared search for “prime ministers”:
or how about “SSIS tasks”:
Google Squared has pulled back relevant information and put it into a table format which does seem very useful but in many ways it highlights a problem with search engines in this day and age; the information simply isn’t complete and therefore can’t be trusted. We don’t have a definitive list of all prime minsters here and neither do we have a definitive list of all tasks provided with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) either. Based on this would you trust the results coming out of Google Squared without additional research? I certainly wouldn’t.
On the subject of consuming this data, wouldn’t it be great if there were an easy mechanism of consuming structured data like this? Something none-proprietary, open and based on a standard? Well, if you had read and taken any notice of my recent blog post Whatever happened to Live Clipboard? you’d be aware that a mechanism that purports to solving this problem (i.e. Live Clipboard) has already been mooted but unfortunately has failed to gain any traction in the industry. That’s a real shame because Live Clipboard could provide a way to (for example) copy data from a Google Squared result into an Excel spreadsheet and vice versa. As I said in that previous blog post:
Here’s hoping [the lack of adoption of Live Clipboard] changes soon because it sounds like a very useful technology and to a fella like me whose primary interest is data integration anything that uses well-known standards as a method of doing that is worthy of attention.
All that being said Google Squared is a very interesting advancement in the increasingly intermingling worlds of data integration and search, even if it does think that George Clinton is an ex-US Vice President :)
Any thoughts? Let me know in the comments!
-Jamie