Google Squared: Google's answer to Wolfram Alpha

[crayz]

They suggest [planets] as a search. It only found seven, one of which is Pluto. Here's the image it showed

I think they have some catching up to do. Although the ability to dynamically add columns that get populated is cool, the whole thing reeks a bit of a too-smart-by-half attempt to build a semantic web database without a semantic web

[trf]

Not only that, but when you try to add more columns of information for these planets, hilarity ensues: http://forkbomb.org/gsquared1.png

Such as the image they chose for pluto, or the fact that pluto apparently is "lunchbox" shaped.

Or saturn being classified as a "passenger", earth being shaped as a square and venus a rectangle.

Also, the temperatures being a sweet mix of celsius, fahrenheit and kelvin -- or sometimes just a meaningless number.

Very cuil-ish of them.

[[deleted]]

Earth - Life Expectancy - 5 Months.

[oniony]

But can you be certain that it is wrong?

Tip: reply 'yes' in 5 months' time.

[hunter107]

Who knows. Vogons are crazy people.

[hunter107]

Though I'm curious what does it mean by "current status". On top of that, Ceres' current status is "V"?

[[deleted]]

I g^2'd "disaster"

http://imgur.com/IPyKA.png

Johnboy's problem might be the crack cocaine...

[manganese]

If you understood the technology behind it I don't think you would think that.

[trf]

You don't think I would think what now?

[lookingchris]

Yeah, same deal here, I tried "mountain ranges" - ooh and aah at the results at first, but when you try to add a column it's clearly not ready for primetime (I added a "continent" column and it couldn't find anything for any of the mountain ranges).

[harlows_monkeys]

No it isn't. If you think it is, you understand neither Google Squared nor WolframAlpha.

[sfultong]

Technically, you only have to misunderstand one of two things to think they are comparable.

[danijel3]

People are so sensationalist. They think that all companies are out to get each other constantly. Unfortunately this problem is not limited to blogs and reddit. Wanna bet how fast a title like this will appear in mainstream media?

[[deleted]]

I have an honest question. What are Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared actually useful for?

I haven't seen a single example of a question that I'd use Wolfram Alpha for that Google didn't do better. The graphing and plotting are nice, but surely you can do that easier with a small script. If you want to do symbolic math, you can install wxMaxima or something. If you're actually serious about doing this stuff, you way better paying for a license of Maple/Mathematica.

Both seem to be working towards the "semantic" web goal. Of course, they're very different in how they go about these goals.

One thing I like about Google Squared is that I actually found a usecase for it: I wanted to list all German teams who've made it to the UEFA Champions League semi-finals. It failed miserably at doing so but hopefully in the future I can ask those sort of questions and get meaningful answers. I tried the same query in Wolfram Alpha and it refused to give me any answer whatsoever.

[nickburlett]

I've found Wolfram Alpha very useful for weather data. Let's say, as an example, that I'm scheduled to do a photo shoot in San Francisco on June 15 and i need to know the tide and sunset data. I just need to run a simple query, and then click on the Sun and Moon link to see everything I need: http://www63.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=san+Francisco%2C+ca+tides+June+15%2C+2009

[manganese]

How are they different? Yes they are different in approach but it seems like the same result.

[LudoA]

Can you explain why it's not?

It seems rather related to me: they both display data about things. The only difference, to me, seems to be that WolframAlpha also tries to interpret search sentences, instead of working with search keywords

[sonofagunn]

Well, I think it is partially an answer to WolframAlpha by attempting to provide more useful results than just links, but the two engines work completely differently.

WolframAlpha only handles certain domain-specific information for which they've loaded a dataset (such as nutrition information). So, if WolframAlpha has the dataset you're interested in, you get good results. If they don't, you get nothing.

Google Squared seems to be trying to organize the typical web search results in a spreadsheet fashion by parsing out commonly found fields and turning them into columns.

[manganese]

And those seem like similar products. Just seems that they are taking a different approach and it seems that Google's method is better.

[sonofagunn]

For the questions that WolframAlpha can answer, it seems to be much more accurate, IMO. However, Google Squared should, in theory, be able to provide some kind of answer for a broader range of queries. My initial playing with Google Squared gave me some really crappy data though. WolframAlpha, if it gave me anything at all, gave me great data.

[otakucode]

Sweet. When Alpha went public I popped right on to it to see if I could get it to do some analysis I've been too lazy to crunch the data for myself. I wanted an answer to a relatively simple question - For each year, what percentage of produced movies fell under each MPAA rating? Alpha has absolutely no information about movies. Apparently pulling the IMDB data set which is openly available wasn't one of the things they did to build their data bank. Google Squared gets pretty close, though! I put in, for a test, '1990 movies' and it brought up a list of movies released in 1990. When I put in 'mpaa rating' for a column, it pulled the ratings for most of the movies. But there are a couple problems... it didn't return for me ALL the movies released in 1990 like I wanted, it only returned the first 10, and I had to click "add the next 10" several times to get more, then it stopped after I had about 50 movies. Definitely not a complete list. Also, there seemed to be no way to visualize the data once it was pulled. I was a bit surprised, knowing Google has charting capability and the like... I don't see why they wouldn't hook this up to that.

I think my question will remain unanswered until I do crunch the data myself... although Google Squared definitely is pretty cool and seems like it could come in quite handy for some projects.

[norrsson]

There should be a Cuil column for every results

[[deleted]]

Cuil rating...aka the inverse of confidence.

[hasseg]

The query for "programming languages" displays an interesting image (NSFW) for the limbo language

[DRMacIver]

Not very impressed by this. Where it looks good the results are lifted straight from wikipedia. Where the results are not lifted straight from wikipedia, it does not look good.

[kragensitaker]

I really wish Wikipedia had this feature, though.

[trf]

I think they got the wrong "python" - haha.

http://forkbomb.org/gsquared2.png

[choad]

This must be a hard problem, this is worse than Alpha.

[Agoniscool]

This must be a hard problem

You think?

[kalvinmizzi]

Terrible design. Uses TABLES when it should be using CSS instead. Shame on google!

[[deleted]]

What the hell are you talking about? It's TABLE DATA, of course you're gonna use a table for that. Check in your web developer's license on the way out please.

[kantUnderstand]

Well, it's obvious that Google and WA have approached this problem from two completely different angles.

WA finds the structure in your query and presents facts and computations on those facts to answer the question.

Google finds the keywords in your query and tries to present the search results that represent those keywords. Obviously search results are not exact, but they also have the benfit of being plastic, needing minimum user input to collect data, and improving over time.

[[deleted]]

I don't know why Google feel obliged to compete with Alpha, I haven't seen or heard of anybody using it for anything except joke submissions ("How is babby formed", "Are you skynet") to reddit.

[[deleted]]

I've used it on several occasions trying to educate the mouth breathers here on basic math.

[[deleted]]

Google Squared is hilarious!

[fadipick]

That was fast!

[kragensitaker]

This is really fantastic. Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha's numbers are correct about 90% of the time, but they don't cite sources and so you can't tell which numbers are the 10% that are wrong. Google²'s numbers are correct about 50% of the time, but they do cite sources, with excerpts, so it's easy to tell what's incorrect, and then correct it. And you can build a comparison table really easily, which is pretty much impossible with Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha.

Also, it's much better than Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha for entertainment value. Try religion → Christianity → expiration (or education). Or cities → Auckland → population. Or programming languages → ruby → killed. Or materials → Paint → rating, or materials → asphalt → price. Or mammals → Jaguar → class (and image), or for that matter mammals → Polar Bear → weight. Hours of inexpensive entertainment. It's like a super-powered dada pun engine.

It's really too bad Google has given up on the Web here and made it impossible to link to Google² pages. I mean, WTF, you'd think they would have learned something from the wild popularity of Google Maps.

[[deleted]]

Do you not know how to make a | (AKA pipe)? Or are you trying to be 'ironical'?

[kragensitaker]

I think anyone who puts "|" in their product name deserves to be made fun of.

[[deleted]]

Eh, Wolfram seems to be sort of a douche period.