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Comment by timcederman | Hacker News Reader

Is it bad that I just don't get this?

Google is returning structured data.

Google's specialty has been navigating through the seas of unstructured Web data that comprises the Web and making sense of it. Squared shows that they understand enough about this data to (semi-) automatically return it in a structured form.

Structured data on this scale is considered a bit of a holy grail, especially from the POV of Semantic Web advocates. The cornerstone of the original Semantic Web vision was to have web developers manually annotate semantics into their HTML sites. Now they don't have to.

The real value of Squared is the ability to query this data via an API. Arguably, Freebase already provides this capability, so the value of Squared is questionable, but presumably, Google is more automated and up-to-date or at a larger scale. I'm not sure -- maybe somebody more well-informed than I can comment.

Nice, thanks for the very useful dissemination.

I think it's one of google's answers to wolfram alpha

And Yahoo YQL

There is no relationship at all. YQL is just a way to query disparate Yahoo data sources with a relational-like language.

I don't see the similarity at all. Wolfram Alpha gives you detailed information about one thing. Google Squared gives you general info on a things in a category.

This fits right in with Wolfram|Alpha. In order to produce all the amazing comparisons Wolfram|Alpha they had to turn databases, and the public web into structured data sets. What would make this much more then novel is if the collected data sets were made public or licensed for academic use. I'm hesitant to say commercial use because a) they can already do that and probably will, and b) it's the public assisting with collecting the data. One problem with Wolfram Alpha that a user submitted structured data will not solve is the ability to cite sources (or provide some reason to trust the sources). Wolfram Alpha has created a bunch of it's own datasets and academically you just have to "trust them".

I didn't either. Maybe I still don't.

I think it takes a search and is smart enough to give you comparisons between results. Look at their examples to get a feel for how it works.

I could be wrong, someone let me know if I'm completely off base.

I did check out the example searches. First one I clicked on - Hawaiian islands. http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=Hawaiian%20islands...

What does "color" refer to here? The island's flower? What colour is melemele?

I should point out, I get what it does technically, but I'm just struggling to think of a repeatable user scenario where this would be useful...

I also noticed a couple of weird things:

1) They're not URL encoding their example searches. Tsk.

2) Searching for "google squared" on regular Google brings up Techcrunch, and the Google Squared site is halfway down the list.

Try example searches for "roller coaster" and "US presidents" . I think those are better examples to try and get a feel for what's going on.

Using heuristics, it attempts to form structure from unstructured data. It's a pretty good first attempt.

Official description: http://www.google.com/support/faqs/bin/answer.py?answer=1392...

It works fine for products, but in that capacity it's just a slightly different layout for a Google Product search. (anyone else still think of that as "froogle"?)

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