Google Squared is a new search feature which was recently released in Google Labs. According to the Official Google Blog post:
"Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet."
What Google Squared does when you search for a particular term is to create a squared result composed of rows for displaying the other aspects of that particular search term. The squared search result is also composed of columns, which is used to represent the corresponding facets of the search terms.
To explain the concept of Google Squared better, lets say you are searching for automobiles. Using the search term "automobiles" in Google Squared would yield the squared SERPs containing rows of different types of automobiles. Each rows would have different columns containing essential information about these automobiles including image, description, headquarters, class, genus and the last column contains a tab for adding more information regarding the specific automobiles. Choosing to add more columns would prompt you to enter whatever other information you want Google to search and display.
Each of the items in the columns are clickable links that would point you to relevant sites related to the search term. This represents the individual search results items in a normal Google web search.
Essentially, Google Squared searches the web to cull the types of information that you might be interested in. After gathering these facts, Google Squared then process these and display the results in a more structured way.
Well, you can actually consider Google Squared as Google's first steps towards creating a more structured search engine.
What's interesting about Google Squared is the fact that the Google Engineers put some user-intervention mechanism into it. Hence, you can add more columns as well as delete columns which you think are not important to you. Now, when you remove columns, Google Squared will immediately suggest new columns and rows until you finally found all the pertinent information that you are looking for.
Google Squared is still in beta mode but you can try it out by visiting the Google Squared site. Since it is still in beta mode, expect to encounter some inconsistencies in search results. The good thing is, you can edit the squared search results so you only get the most meaningful and relevant search result.
Like other features in Google Labs, Google Squared still has more room for improvement. But as it is right now, it can already match up against possible competitors. Google Squared is Google's first step towards establishing a structured search engine. And it is obviously Google's take on a similar search engine - Wolfram Alpha.