Google squared just launched its initial preview to the public today following the announcement earlier in the month at their Searchology event. My initial impressions are on the whole positive, I’ve tried a few web related queries on the service to see what it could do.
Squared apart from the geeky mathematics reference appears to have two main goals, firstly to produce results in a much more structure way – and secondly to further integrate human knowledge via user generated content. Google have been moving towards a more structured approach to search in recent weeks; and this appears to be their offering in relation to Wolfram’s recent prediction engine. The Wonder wheel development is most likely tapping into similar technologies.
For seo purposes it will be useful in finding other related terms, and indeed related products within a niche when researching article ideas- try a search for cms systems for example, and the grid produced is pretty accurate and stands up with my own knowledge on the subject.
If it can’t figure out what you mean, you can redefine your query through a series of input boxes, to give the engine “hints” as to what you are looking for. Which is a welcome addition for the phrases with multiple potential meanings. Herein lies the genius, this is the equivalent of the image labeler for search. Google will be learning what terms are related and potentially connected together via human computation.
The images brought back are coming directly as you would expect from Google’s image search, and may be an indicator as to which images are getting more weight and prove useful for further optimising images in image search.
Overall this will give webmasters and users alike something to play about with to open up the brain of Google that bit more, and see what is inside the box.
