Google Squared Won’t Crush Wolfram Alpha
By Anna Johnson on June 9th, 2009ReadWriteWeb reports that despite talk of Google Squared crushing Wolfram Alpha, in reality Google’s new structured data search engine isn’t all that useful after all.
Like Wolfram Alpha, Google Squared is a ‘search engine’ that creates structured data from a large reservoir of information and lets users compare various things.
According to ReadWriteWeb, the Google Squared user interface is inflexible and the selection of data odd. It seems the tool is quite good at generating ‘almost helpful’ results.
Similar objections were raised about Wolfram Alpha, but I think it’s way too early to rule these tools out.
I gave Google Squared a whirl by typing in ‘religions’ and got a list of seven results with the option to add more items. I found the results to be reasonably informative. Moreover, I was impressed that when I added something that wasn’t on the list nor in the suggested items, Google Squared returned some decent information.
Give both Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared a few more iterations and we may well see them pumping out some incredible information. The potential is there, and there are enough brains inside both companies to create tools that live up to, or even exceed, that potential.
Here’s where to try out Google Squared.
