Google Squared is Now Online

It looks like getting your search results in tabular form is the flavor of the month.

First we had the new WolframAlpha search engine, now we have Google Squared.

Here's a search on both for the world's tallest building:

This looks like a clear win for WolframAlpha but it's not that simple. With Wolfram I had to fiddle around with various ways of phrasing the search before it even understood what I wanted while Google Squared got it immediately.

And the same pattern applied to other searches.  Google understood what I wanted immediately for the search "most popular browser" while I couldn't get any sense from Wolfram regardless what I tried. Mind you the results Google gave on that search weren't all that impressive; it gave a list of browsers rather than the most popular.

Both these search engines are still in a developmental stage and results are very variable depending on the particular search you make.

If you want your search results in tabular form you may be better using a normal Google search to locate a page containing the results you want and then use a product like the free OutWit Firefox plug-in to extract the data from the page in a form that's usable in a spreadsheet or other document.

Gizmo