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By David Meyer, 5 June 2009 08:29

NEWS

Google has begun public evaluation of an experimental search tool that organises results into an editable grid.

Google Squared, one of the company's Labs projects, was first announced in mid-May and was released to the public on Wednesday.

The tool presents search results in a grid that resembles a spreadsheet. For example, a search for the term 'lighthouses' will return a list of lighthouses. The results go down the vertical axis, with attributes such as 'country' and 'latitude' extending in columns along the horizontal axis.

People can then input values to create new columns in the grid, or add new items as rows. Each cell in the grid, when hovered over with the cursor, displays the website where the information in that cell comes from.

Alex Komoroske, an associate product manager for Google Squared, wrote in a blog post that the feature was designed to provide quick answers for complex questions that would ordinarily require research across multiple sites.

"While gathering facts from across the internet is relatively easy [albeit tedious] for humans to do, it's far more difficult for computers to do automatically," Komoroske wrote. "Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way."

Komoroske was keen to stress that the technology behind the Google Labs project was by no means perfect.

"That's why we designed Google Squared to be conversational, enabling you to respond to the initial result and get a better answer," he wrote. "If there's another row or column you'd like to see, you can add it and Google Squared will automatically attempt to fetch and fill in the relevant facts for you. As you remove rows and columns you don't like, Google Squared will get a fresh idea of what you're interested in and suggest new rows and columns to add."

Google currently has no solid plans to release Google Squared outside the Labs environment, a spokesman told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Thursday. "All of our products in Labs sink or swim under their own merit and there's no timeline," he said.