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Google Squared rounds out features
More facts in your spreadsheet search thingy...
Google Squared - the experimental web tool that delivers Google search results as a table (because tables rock, that's why) - recently received an update to improve the quality and quantity of data it spits out.
According to Google's blog, when it launched this spring, Squared could only include 30 facts (aka: squares) for each subject searched. Now, the feature can pump out a good 120 (for example, 20 US presidents x 6 attributes).
Google also said the quality of information has been souped up because now its ranking results both on relevance and whether enough accurate information is available on the subject.
Squared results can be sorted and exported to a Google Spreadsheet or CSV file now as well.
Although fun to play with, the ambitious little tool is clearly not ready for, well, whatever it's intended for on a professional level. At publication, Squared seemed a little unsure about some of Canada's prime ministers, and more embarrassingly, sorely lacking the ability to accurately sort Dungeon and Dragons monsters.
Google seems to recognize these shortcomings, but claims Squared demonstrates ways we'll be searching stuff in the not-to-distant land of tomorrow: "There's a lot left to do before Squared is ready to leave Labs — we're still working on improving quality as well as the user interface — but we hope that our recent improvements make it more useful," Google Squared folk wrote in a blog post. "In its experimental stage, Squared demonstrates an important future direction in search: understanding structured data from across the web to build new tools for organizing and presenting information."
We should note that Squared works splendidly for some things — for example 16th century poets — but c'mon, the Displacer Beast hasn't been classified as lawful evil since the 4th edition of D&D. Priorities please, Google! ®