Saturday, July 25, 2009

Red fruit in square bins

While looking for something else, I happened to encounter, or possibly re-encounter, Google Squared. Google doesn't exactly advertise it prominently. I came across it by selecting Even more ... from the More ... drop down on Google's home page, then Labs, where Squared is third among many. The lack of fanfare is probably appropriate. In its present form at least, it seems more like an interesting experiment than anything like a showcase product, thus the placement on Labs.

I started throwing some of the Baker's Dozen questions at it, but it soon became clear that it's just not aimed at answering plain English queries. However, if you give it red fruit as a query, the results are pretty nice; better, in fact, than any from the original baker's dozen.

I have to say I'm not completely sure what Squared is meant to do, beyond assembling search results into a grid based on some sort of vague and probably dynamic criterion. Still, it seems like a fairly neat hack.

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