Google Squared – not just a silly name

If you think about it, search is still at a very early stage of development.  It really hasn’t evolved much since it was first made popular by Yahoo a long while back.  Sure, Google has made it faster to get results and they have a nice clean interface, oh and they figured out that whole advertising piece, but search itself hasn’t really improved.

When you search for something on the web, you don’t get back what you’re looking for.  You get back a list of pages that might have what you are looking for.  And often times you have to go back and forth from the search results page trying to find the site that has the information you’re looking for.

Recently Google and the other engines started rolling social into your search results, which is a good start toward making strides in search effectiveness.

So now Google has rolled out a new Labs venture called Google Squared.  It’s Google’s attempt to start trying to organize your search results into relevant blocks of information, similar to a spreadsheet.  Here’s a video:

I played with it and here’s an example of a Square that I created for geo-location checkin systems.

Certainly its at its early stages and needs some work (I had to enter in the initial rows for the Square I created, then it started populating the rest), but you can start to see the potential.  While I’ve been a big fan of some of the non-search related products that Google has rolled out lately, especially Wave, I’m glad to see them working on improving the search side of the house.