Google Squared Offers New Way to Display Search Results

If you don’t regularly check out the Google Labs page, you could be missing out on being an early adopter of the Next Big Thing. A new testing product called Google Squared displays results in a format similar to MS Excel.

For example a search of “Yankees” pulls up several former Yankee players and people associated with the team. I didn’t care what side of the plate each person batted from so I deleted that column. I then added a “batting average” column. In under a second it populated the search results. Columns can be deleted and added. We’d love to see a click and drag option to reposition info on the page.

If you search for an item that is not yet indexed, you will be told there is not enough information to build a square.

Another search of “Angelina Jolie” turned up a grid of her movies – with columns for images, descriptions, director, language and author. Wow! I can see where a comprehensive search like this could actually take away Web traffic from certain Websites. If we get all of our answers in the search, why even bother going to the original source?

Google does offer input on recommended additional columns. In Angelina’s case, you can add “Awards,” “Producers” and “Running time” to the the square.

If you sign in you can save your Squares.

You can start your search from scratch with an empty square. Rather than an elaborate filter, Google Squared is simply a different way to gather and display data.

I love it!

As someone who loves to compare and contrast, and is also a huge fan of well-organized tables, I will be using Google Squared from here on in.

It’s this type of forward thinking that, in this author’s opinion, that will keep Google way ahead of competitors like the recently launched Bing.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.