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Google Squared Declares the Living Dead  (View post)

milivella [PersonRank 10]

Friday, June 5, 2009
15 years ago3,717 views

Well, first of all: thanks for quoting me, Philipp (above all because there were a lot of more thorough opinions than mine!).

"Or perhaps that’s what a laboratory should be for?" Yes, it is. And I'm interested in the opinion of the other Blogoscopeders. But let me try to briefly defend my asserts anyway...

1. OK, Labs is for presenting great ideas with incomplete implementation. But some implementation is needed. A paper describing Squared is not enough for Labs. A Squared prototype that give you only wrong result is not enough for Labs. The actual Squared? IMO, it's close to these two examples: it's too buggy.

2. Squared is not at the same level of the other Labs experiment: Trends, Similar Images (not to speak of the former experiment that graduated from Labs)... even Sets (that admittedly has a far narrower scope) is more useful than Squared.

3. Maybe it's just an illusion, but it's hard not to think that Squared was published earlier than it should because of Wolfram Alpha's launch.

ahab [PersonRank 5]

15 years ago #

Google Squares may be employing the same technology as used in Google Docs spreadsheets, i.e. the GoogleLookup function (compare =GoogleLookup("Clint Eastwood" ; "Date of Death") with the result in Google Squared)

The GoogleLookup was already infamous for returning either no information, outdated information, incorrect information or no information at all, forcing the user to verify the outcome of each lookup.

The function had become slightly better in a later revision, probably by employing the same technology as Google Squared, by sometimes offering the user several 'Other values' to choose from. The overall result of the GoogleLookup function and Google Squared in general is however very haphazard...

Svetlana Gladkova [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Philipp, thanks for covering the subject, it does seem that Google Squared has a bad habit of declaring the alive people dead. But a small correction here: where Yeltsin actually passed already, I was referring to the current Russian president Dmitry Medvedev who is presumably dead for only 2 weeks now which does not seem to be true judging by the local news I've watched today :) Thanks for bringing the topic to a broader discussion!

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

[Thanks Svetlana, I added the word "correctly" to that paragraph to clarify, and added the reference to Medvedev.]

Ben Crox [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Date of Death is definitely the most juicy tab to play around. When I squared "Hong Kong", Google tells people when HK had been fallen and when the 1 country 2 system loomed to its secret death. Through not truth, we are more then excited to worship its Spaghetti Holiness as the oracle.

http://friendfeed.com/bencrox/33743a19/google-hong-kong-1-1976-2-hk-2008-3-2001

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