Search Engine Land » Google: Squared

Google Testing “Sources” Area With Info About Movies, Books, People, Music & More

Danny Sullivan — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:38:24 +0000

Last November, Google tested a new “Sources” section in its search results, in the third column where ads normally appear. It seems the testing is underway again, showing extended information about actors, films, musicians, people and more. It also seems likely everyone may see this extended information soon, and that it’s the “search refresh” the Wall Street Journal wrote about in March finally arriving.

Experiment Confirmed

I noticed these appearing yesterday in my own search results, and Google has confirmed that there’s an experiment happening:

We’re always experimenting with ways to improve search, but we have nothing to announce at this time.

Google does indeed often experiment with new formats, randomly tagging some visitors to see the formats being tested. I apparently was one of those tagged. Most people, however, won’t see some of the examples I’ll share below, as they’re not tagged into the experiment.

I think that will change in the near future, because as I’ll explain at the end, this is one test that I suspect will go fully live soon.

TV Shows

Here’s what I see in a search for Lost:

You can see off to the right-hand side there’s a little summary about the TV show “Lost” that’s drawn from Wikipedia. Cast members are listed, along with a “People also search for” area showing other TV shows that seem related to Lost.

In the previous test last November, this box was called “Sources.” That label is now gone. I’m continuing to call it the “Sources” box for want of a better name.

Actors

Clicking on the links generates a new Google search along with further information. Here’s a close-up of what’s shown for Evangeline Lilly:

Movies

Similar units appear for movies, such as this for in a search for Avengers:

Music & Bands

Musical groups like U2 appear:

People

There’s also extended information about some people, apparently if they are listed in Wikipedia. For example, a search for “dooce” brings up extended information about blogger Heather Armstrong, who is known by that name:

Books

Even books can get a special display:

With Or Without Google+

None of the units are dependent on Google+, nor are they part of Search Plus Your World. They appear whether you’re signed in or not, whether you use Google+ or not. But if you are part of Google+, the units might get additional information.

For example, signed-out, I see this for a search on the TV show New Girl:

Signed-in, since I follow the New Girl page on Google+, information from that appears in a “From your circles” area above the sources box:

New Format For Direct Answers Live For Everyone?

Google is also showing direct answers that come from different sources. Bas van den Beld from State Of Search also appears to be in the test and noted that for a search on “hot fuzz director,” he got a direct answer like this:

This is similar to what you see at Bing for the same search, where the information is disclosed as coming from Freebase, a service that Google owns:

However, these direct answers don’t seem part of the sources experiment. For example, using my Chrome browser in “incognito” mode, which keeps me out of the Google sources test, I can still make these boxes appear, such as this for “avengers cast:”

Is This The “Search Refresh” The WSJ Wrote About?

Direct answers like these have long been part of Google. The formats, however, seem new. The addition of the sources box also suggests that what the Wall Street Journal wrote about earlier this year, about Google offering more direct and semantic answers, is about to happen.

In WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!, I took the WSJ article to task because I thought it overhyped what was likely to happen, which was Google expanding things that it already does.

That still seems to be the case. This will no doubt be a big change to hit Google. But it will also be one of those “evolutionary not revolutionary” type of changes.

If you see these boxes, then you’re one of the few who have also been tagged as part of the experiment. If you don’t, then there’s not much you can do but wait. It seems likely they’ll eventually come for everyone.

WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!

Danny Sullivan — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:26:11 +0000

The Wall Street Journal is out with a story saying that Google is about to make one of the biggest changes in its history of offering web search, providing more direct answers and gaining “semantic” smarts to understand more about what words mean. I’m scratching my head, since Google already does this. Methinks Google’s PR has exploded in ways it didn’t expect.

Beyond Blue Links!

From the story, we learn things such as:

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

and:

The company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called “semantic search,” which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.

and:

Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

Be sure to read the full article. I don’t want to be doing too many extended quotes out of it. But having read it several times myself, I keep trying to understand what’s new here.

Google’s Existing Semantic Search & Direct Answers

Google’s arguably been doing semantic search since 2003, when it began searching for synonyms of the words actually entered. It has increased its understanding of the meaning of words over the years and even did a detailed blog post about this in 2010. Here’s another from 2009:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

As for “spitting out” those “facts and direct answers” that the WSJ story talks about, Google’s been doing that for so long that it’s hard for me to even know exactly when it all began.

Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack from 2009 covers how direct answers were provided in response to a variety of searches, and many of these answers were already integrated into Google for years before that was written.

UPS & FedEx tracking reports, along with flight status updates, a built-in calculator and more. Had it in 2004. Movie information and stock charts? 2005. Music and weather? 2006. Sports scores? 2009.

Here’s Google blogging about “Just the facts, fast” in 2005:

Have you ever needed a piece of info right now? Today we’re excited to introduce Google Q&A.

We’ve pulled together facts from all over the Web to help give you the fastest possible access to the quick bits of information you need every day; just type a query into the search box, and you’ll get back the answer at the top of your search results. Q&A knows about a lot of areas: celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics, movies, and anything else we’ve thought of so far (including enabling you to get answers on your mobile device).

Try it out, and keep checking back. This is only the beginning.

Google Squared Still Lives

How about extracting facts from pages, to figure out things like the inventor of the telephone or when a movie release will happen. Google touted doing all this using its Google Squared technology in 2010. See here on the Google blog and our own stories:

By the way, Google even was offering facts like the sexual orientation of celebrities, though this was dropped last year.

Honestly, it sounds like Google is just going to ramp up showing results that come from its Google Squared technology, as well as what’s been built since its Freebase / Metaweb acquistion. The WSJ mentions the latter, but not Google Squared:

But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google’s acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities….

Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing “extraction algorithms,” or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web.

It also approached organizations and government agencies to obtain access to databases, including the CIA World Factbook, which houses up-to-date encyclopedic information about countries worldwide.

Google Squared was closed as a stand-alone service last year, but the technology has remained a part of Google search. These articles explain more about it:

Why If There’s PR Smoke, There Might Be No Fire

If all this isn’t really new, why’s it getting played up so big with the Wall Street Journal, as well as Mashable last month? Mashable even quoted Google talking about its “knowledge graph” for the first time that I’ve seen.

My take is that Google’s pushing these technologies for some good PR, and they are in turn being blown up out of proportion to what will really happen.

Google’s been under intense pressure in some quarters since rolling out Search Plus Your World, pressure that its results aren’t as good as in the past. It’s helpful to counter that type of bad PR with interviews talking up forward-looking technologies. Heck, it’s right out of Bing’s playbook.

Remember Bing & Powerset?

If you believed all the forward-looking stuff that Bing has pushed, you’d have expected Google to have been a whimpering child of a search engine cowering in the corner, at this point.

Why remember Powerset, with all that amazing semantic technology that Bing later acquired? Here, read up on it:

Sure, Powerset is part of Bing. Did you notice it making Bing significantly better than Google? Has Bing drawn tons more people over to it from Google for having that technology?

Nope. But that doesn’t stop Bing from talking it up, though it seems to have done less of that lately. Powerset is good technology to have. It might lead to important future improvements. But no instant revolution is about to pour forth from it, nor has it.

Remember Bing & Wolfram Alpha?

Heck, remember when Wolfram Alpha partnered up with Bing? This was after Wolfram Alpha’s factually-based search engine failed to wipe Google off the map, as some assumed it would. Here are some reminders of that:

For all that the direct answers were supposed to be important, I can’t even get Bing to trigger some of the examples it touted when linking up with Wolfram Alpha.

Make no mistake. Wolfram Alpha is a cool, useful search engine. In fact, I had a long, excellent conversation with Stephen Wolfram on Monday while at the SXSW conference about how things are going and some interesting things to come. Stay tuned.

But it’s important to distinguish between what’s put out as PR versus what’s likely to happen in reality. Bing’s done a lot of big talk, and when that big talk has done nothing to stall Google’s market share, it still keeps talking big. This past piece from me explains more about that:

Dear Bing & Yahoo: Pushing Deck Chairs Around Isn’t A Good Plan

Why’s Google Talking Big?

Google’s doing some big talk of its own now, which as I said, is probably being interpreted as even bigger than it really is. But why this specific talk about direct answers and understanding?

For one, Google shot itself in the foot last year. At the D Conference, WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg pointed out to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt that Google didn’t do as good as job as Bing in providing direct answers. And Schmidt agreed! From my coverage then:

Mossberg said that Bing seems to have more direct answers in some cases.

“There’s that in some narrow cases,” Schmidt said.

There you go — one of the top three execs at Google admitting that Bing beats Google, even if it’s in a narrow case. I’m sure there have been some statements like that before, but they’re few and far between.

It was crazy. Mossberg wasn’t right. What the hell is “some” cases supposed to mean. In “some” other cases, Google has more. But overall, no one has any idea who provides more direct answers, much less meaningful direct answers. No one. Mossberg didn’t inventory this himself. There’s no third-party survey out there. It’s not like there’s some “direct answers app store” listing answers that you can count.

That was just Mossberg, in my view, saying what he believed in his gut. It was Schmidt, to me, kind of cowering against Mossberg. He is, after all, Walt Mossberg. You don’t just tell him he’s wrong. Even if he is.

As a result, Google positioned itself as being weak to the leading tech journalist on the planet. How do you pull yourself out of that?

The Siri Problem

I know! Maybe you start talking about all those direct answers you’re going to do? Make sure you do that fairly quickly, because you’ve got another problem brewing.

While your latest Android 4 mobile operating system has arguably made it harder for people to search by voice — and while most Android phones still haven’t been upgraded to it — those iPhone 4S phones all equipped with Siri sold like hotcakes.

What’s Siri doing? Sending some of the searches people do not to you (as you’d think that deal you have with Apple would require) but instead over to Yelp and Wolfram Alpha.

You know, like 25 percent of the voice searches people are doing with Siri. That’s a lot of searches.

The press noticed that. They also noticed when Apple distanced itself from Google Maps in the latest version of iOS. You even had a financial analyst trying to figure if the end of a Google-Apple deal would harm Google’s bottom line. That got press attention, too.

If you’re Google looking at all this, it becomes even more important to start talking about how you have this Wolfram Alpha-like fact engine that you’re churning up. Heck, you even rolled out a Wolfram Alpha-like graphical math calculator last year.

What To Expect

To sum up, Google’s already said several times over the past year or so that it would be providing more and more direct answers. It sounds like that’s the biggest thing that’s likely to be released in the coming months.

Those direct answers potentially take traffic away from a relatively small set of sites that try to serve up direct answers, such as the height of Mount McKinley. That’s sad for those sites, but it’s good for the searcher. And it shouldn’t impact the much larger set of sites out there with broader information.

Indeed, you can already see this now:

You can see the direct answer at the top. The three arrows from that area show how some of the sources also get surfaced as regular results. Below that, the fourth arrow highlights how another site appears.

Having the direct answer might prevent some searchers from clicking through to any of these. But with the answer already in some of the page descriptions, they probably weren’t clicking much already.

There have also been reports that Google’s working on a better version of Google Voice Actions, a version that’s more assistant-like, in the way Siri is. It might even get called Majel. That sounds reasonable, especially given how long various Googlers have talked about wanting to have a Star Trek-like computer (as voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry).

But in the end, for all that the search engines have talked for years about going beyond “10 blue links,” I’d be surprised if the changes the WSJ story today talks about dramatically alter what we see now on Google. More answers, sure. But those 10 blue links will still likely remain the core of what’s shown.

For Google’s part, when I emailed for any comment, it replied with: ”We have nothing specific to announce at this time.”

I’ll be following up to see if I can pry anything more on-the-record about this.

Postscript: Google’s Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s search efforts and who was cited in the WSJ story, has posted to Google+ to say:

Some recent news coverage about Google has sparked interest in where we are and where we’re headed in search.

Let me just say that every day, we’re improving our ability to give you the best answers to your questions as quickly as possible. In doing so, we convert raw data into knowledge for millions of users around the world. But our ability to deliver this experience is a function of our understanding your question and also truly understanding all the data that’s out there. And right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited. Ask us for “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” and we’ll give you decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is.

In 2010, we acquired Freebase, an open-source knowledge graph, and in the time since we’ve grown it from 12 million interconnected entities and attributes to over 200 million. Our vision for this knowledge graph is as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge — an endless cycle of creativity and insight.

But as I explained in an interview last month [ED note: the Mashable interview I mentioned above], our initial steps towards this virtuous cycle are indeed baby steps. So stay tuned for updates on what will continue to be a long road ahead.

The last part is key in all this: “the long road ahead.” I think that underscores the point of what I’ve written, that you’re unlikely to see a massive change to how Google search looks and operates in the near term.

Google Expands Use & Display Of Related Searches

Matt McGee — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:06:35 +0000

Google has announced an interesting expansion of its related search capabilities. The updates to Google’s search results will show up in a number of different ways:

Search References/Lists

When the search query suggests results that may involve a list, Google will show what it calls the “top references” for the query. This may show up for searches such as “greek philosophers,” “american authors” and — as shown below — “seattle neighborhoods.”

That display may appear anywhere on the first page of search results. But, if the user clicks on “Ballard” or one of the other names on the list, it generates a search for that person/item and the list of references moves to the top of the search results.

Artist Searches

Searches for certain well-known artists may now generate a list of related paintings/artwork. Google says these related images/links will appear at the bottom of the search results.

Entertainment Searches

Various searches related to entertainment will now show related information, too. Google says searches for TV shows and movies will show related cast members, while searches for entertainers like Tom Hanks U2 will also show new types of related lists/searches. (In my testing, I was unable to see anything new on these types of searches yet.)

Google says it’s using a “variety of signals” to develop these new lists, and the new related search display is based in part on the Google Squared technology.

“Anti-Search Engine” FindTheBest Adds Buying Guides, Top 10 Slideshows

Greg Sterling — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:43:12 +0000

There are a number of ways to describe FindTheBest, the site launched last year by DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Connor. One is “decision engine” another might be “comparison engine,” a third could be “anti-search engine.”

It might be called an “anti-search engine” because, like Blekko’s Rich Skrenta, FindTheBest’s O’Conner believes that search results have become cluttered and filled with spam. O’Conner wanted to provide structured, “apples-to-apples comparisons” of places, institutions and products with total transparency.

The site aggregates and then provides structured comparison data across a growing range of categories, including Arts and Entertainment, Education, Health, Science, Technology (and tech products), Sports, Recreation and others.

FindTheBest has been upgrading its UI and functionality and today is considerably more usable than when it launched. It’s getting better and better.

This morning it introduced “Top 10 slideshows” and “buyers guides.” There’s a “consumer reports”-like angle here except that the content are from a range of third party sources and it’s all free.

Here’s an example of a new buyer’s guide for AT&T smartphones:

FindTheBest makes the point that these buyers guides are not generic but highly specific (e.g., California Colleges, Ski Resorts in France). Here’s an example of one of the Top 10 slideshows for laptops (which can be embedded):

Find the Best Laptops and Netbooks

The ultimate ambition of the site is to become “a trusted source for consumers to find reliable information free from hidden marketing schemes.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Greg Sterling — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:45:20 +0000

At first blush it wasn’t impressive to me. I assumed from a quick look that FindTheBest was just a collection of links and “best of” lists. It thus seemed strange that DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Connor would come out of quasi-retirement to launch a basic directory site. But as we got into it a bit more it was clear there was a larger and more interesting project going on.

FindTheBest is a kind of comparison engine for structured data of all sorts. It’s not an alternative to search per se. In fact it will rely heavily on search and SEO for user discovery. The idea is to provide consumers with an objective way to compare all sorts of information across a range of categories, from colleges to fast food.

Here’s what founder O’Conner said about what motivated him to create the site:

FindTheBest.com was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way. While the web is great at making seemingly infinite amounts of information accessible, the Internet can be a little overwhelming in that it doesn’t allow for straight up apples-to-apples comparisons, nor is it transparent enough to allow you to spot those hidden marketing schemes influencing the data you receive.

Here are the current categories that FindTheBest offers comparison data for:

Arts and Entertainment
Business and Economy
Education
Health
Reference
Science
Society
Sports and Recreation
Technology

The metaphor, as the video below suggests, is travel meta search (e.g., Kayak).

After a user does a search or picks a category of interest, she’s presented with a semi-wonky spreadsheet-like display of factual information. Here’s an example comparison for the nutritional information of McDonald’s burgers:

A menu, so to speak, on the left allows users to filter and refine the comparisons — in this case by type of food item, as well as by calories, fat, cholesterol and so on — just as with product or travel search sites. These topic-specific data sets are called “comparison apps” by O’Connor.

O’Connor told us that the data come from a broad range of sources, including government databases, private sources the site’s own researchers and, eventually, users. FindTheBest uses a mix of machines and humans to clean and present the data in a more structured and “consumable way,” with automation being the objective, if possible.

Here’s another comparison of the most recent World Cup champions:

Right now FindTheBest offers 336 “comparison apps” in nine categories. These include 31,372,000 listings and 881,837,794 data points, according to the site.

Even with all that information, if it hopes to become a destination, FindTheBest will need to further broaden coverage. However O’Conner says the site won’t get into products or travel, two areas that inspired FindTheBest and that he believes are relatively well handled online today.

As you drill deeper into the site you discover lots of rich factual information, much of which is very search/SEO friendly. Here’s a profile-level page for the top grossing film Avatar, for example:

Another search-friendly feature, somewhat buried in the site, is Questions. Q&A is a hot area right now (Ask, Facebook, etc.) and FindTheBest has its own version of that, though it seems mostly intended to attract SEO traffic rather than engage users.

Many if not every fact on the site has an alternative presentation in Q&A form:

Beyond SEO, as a discovery mechanism, any of the comparison modules can be embedded on third party sites or blogs and there are also embeddable category widgets that FindTheBest hopes will spread the word.

While incomplete and rough around the edges at this early stage FindTheBest offers structured factual comparisons, to help support consumer decision-making, that one cannot do right now on search engines. In this way, FindTheBest struck me as something like the more talented offspring of Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google Buys Metaweb To Bolster Answers, Google Squared & Rich Snippets

Barry Schwartz — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:56:16 +0000

Google announced they have acquired Metaweb. Metaweb is a search company that figures out entities and not just words. I have a video from the company explaining exactly what that means.

In short, Google seems to want to explore and leverage Metaweb’s technology to bolster their rich snippet initiative and Google Squared project. As you now know, Google Squared powers Google’s quick answers. Google said this acquisition will help them “improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone.”

Here is how Google explains future improvements due to Metaweb:

Type [barack obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. We can offer this kind of experience because we understand facts about real people and real events out in the world. But what about [colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000] or [actors over 40 who have won at least one oscar]? These are hard questions, and we’ve acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we’ll be able to provide better answers.

To me, this seems like an automated and scalable version of Wolfram Alpha.

Here is a brief video explaining Metaweb.

Google Squared Answers Now On Google Mobile Results

Barry Schwartz — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:14:17 +0000

The Google Mobile Blog announced that Google Squared which now helps power answers on Google.com is now powering some answers on Google Mobile Search.

You can see this yourself by visiting google.com on your iPhone, Palm WebOS or Android-powered device in English. Here is an example on [star wars release date:

When you tap on “show sources,” you will see:

Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements

Barry Schwartz — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:28:21 +0000

Did you know that Google Squared turned one today? Google noted this fact today and also noted the various web search features Google Squared powers. Currently, Google Squared powers the “sources” displayed for the “best answers” one box and it also powers the new “something different” refinements on the new Google design.

For example, a search on [iron man 2 release date] returns a one box with an answer. Now, Google shows a “sources” link that can be expanded. This little feature is powered from the year-old Google Square. Here is a picture:

Also, if you do a search on [zebra] and look at the left hand menu, you will notice a section named “something different.” That also is powered by Google Square. Here is a picture:

I should note that the “according to” results is not new, they have been around since 2004. What is new is how the information is sourced and now displayed.

Google Squared Is Now Live

Matt McGee — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:24:56 +0000

Google has pulled the covers off of Squared, the search tool that was first demoed during the Searchology event last month.

Google Squared takes a search query and tried to present the results in tabular form — like an online spreadsheet of sorts. Sometimes it works very well and provides interesting results, and other times not so much. Here’s a screenshot of the “very well” example, a search for [u2 albums]:

Squared is very configurable; you can add and delete rows and/or columns, and sometimes replace data that Squared puts in your results. It’s a search tool that’s still part of Google Labs, and frankly, its overall usefulness is questionable. But that, presumably, is exactly what Google Labs is for — testing new ideas and seeing what sticks.

An official announcement of today’s launch is expected soon.

Update: Here’s the official announcement.