Google Squared Offers New Grid Format For Web Searches

Google turned its search engine up a few notches with the launch of its new Google Squared, which went live Wednesday.

Google Squared, demonstrated at Google's Searchology event in May, still aggregates search information found on the Web, but displays results from keyword searches in a grid format classified by various related categories.

The function could be useful to those researching every facet of a topic, due to the fact that Google Squared finds numerous aspects of a subject based on the given keyword and presents it in an easily digestible spreadsheet format.

Type in a key term, such as "salsa dancing," and the search engine presents various results, from salsa organization SalsaCrazy.com, to famous dancers and musicians such as Alex Da Silva and Celia Cruz, accompanied by brief descriptions and thumbnail images. Included in the grid for "salsa dancing" are possible related categories "genre," "year" and "date of birth" that provide the users with additional relevant information.

Users can also add more categories to the rows and columns by clicking the "add columns" box. Once users click on "add," Google Squared suggests further categories, such as "albums" and "professions," which essentially tailors the searches to meet the specific needs of the user.

Google's latest evolution started as an experiment developed in Google Labs. The new search engine has been compared to Wolfram Alpha. However, unlike the information aggregator, it does not "compute" answers from a huge system of trillions of pieces of curated data contained in its own database but instead lists information found on the Web.

Google engineers are continuing to work out the search engine's bugs, and critics maintain that the complex searches aren't always accurate or thorough.

Meanwhile, Google's new functionality comes as Microsoft released its own search engine, Bing, which touts more features, such as more video previews in the browser page, but with guided results formatted in sleek, streamlined panes.

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