Google recently launched their Google Squared service. In their own words, “Google Squared takes a category and creates a starter ‘square’ of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web.”
Do I see myself using Google Squared very often? Probably not. But can it be useful in some circumstances? Definitely. It requires a different way of approaching how you’re going to search.
Usually when I search for something in Google, I just enter a list of the most relevant keywords, with the goal of obtaining very specific results. With Google Squared, though, you don’t want specific results. You want a broad range of results, organized into neat categories. Google Squared is more geared toward those who want to compare information, rather than obtain specific information.
As an example, I typed “Big Band Musicians” into Google Squared, and it came up with this spreadsheet:

With minimal effort, a nice table of data is created for us, with information like dates of birth and death, short bios, and photos of the musicians. You can see that some faulty information may creep in, like the “Library of Congress” on the last row. These can be easily and quickly removed from the list by just clicking the X next to the row. Or if you click on some individual cells, you may get alternative text that makes more sense in the context, and it’s just a simple click to change how the erroneous fields are populated.
The real power of Google Squared comes in the ability to add your own columns. So let’s say I want to get some more information on each musician, like:

  1. Which instrument each musician played.
  2. The name of their spouse.
  3. Some of their famous works.
  4. How they died.

I simply add columns like “Instrument”, “Married”, “Famous For”, and “Cause of Death.” The columns are auto-populated with data, and the result is this modified spreadsheet:

This can be a pretty powerful tool, if you have a need to organize your search results together. Perhaps you’re looking for ski resorts, or local restaurants, and need a way to compare them to make a decision. Or maybe one of your students is writing a paper on insects, or Greek philosophers. A simple Google Squared search can make the collection of tabular data much simpler. Granted, a student will want to fine-tune the data that’s provided if they’re going to use this as a visual aid in a research paper, but it’s a very quick and easy way to jumpstart research on a broad topic. Not to mention Google Squared is certainly much more organized than the straight-down list Google traditionally provides.