Imagine that you were in a situation where you had to collate information on the names, descriptions of, dates of birth for, and birth state for American Civil War generals. Or similar historical data for English castles. Or perhaps data on African countries, with descriptions, capital, currency and size. It's not actually that difficult to do it, and you can pull the data from various sources with ease except that it's probably going to be a little bit long winded and could keep you busy for a while.
Now imagine if Google could do it all for you = create a matrix, compile the content and just pop all that information directly into a spreadsheet for you. That's the idea behind Google Squared. Simply pop to the site and type in your query 'African countries' or 'Civil War generals' and Big G will populate a spreadsheet for you. It'll do it automatically without further intervention on your part and will provide access to things such as images, currency, dates of birth and so on and displays what it's created. 
Marvellous! If you can't see the data that you're after then you can add more columns, and Google will go out and find the new data and pop it into the grid for you.
That's the theory. In practice, once the excited searcher (that's you) deviates from the carefully chosen examples Google offers things fall to pieces very quickly. In fact, you can see this already in the screenshot above. The capital of Tunisia is apparently +1hr, begins last Sunday in March... well yes, quite.
This happens quite frequently - either no data is returned or very often it's the wrong data. My Civil War generals search started returning information on battles, it was unable to work out the full name of generals, even though they were highlighted in the description column. You can do a mouseover to see the grid which then reports the origin of the content, and Google is pulling this stuff from all over. In a sense this is good, but when one biography comes from Wikipedia and another from Amazon you have to worry about the comparability of the data. This in turn means you have to go and check everything individually. A square for Civil War battles turns up Abraham Lincoln as the first element, while the result of the battle of Balls Bluff is 'A small'.
You can overcome this to a certain extent by creating your own square and populating it with whatever appeals to you, and add in any other content as appropriate. This is actually more difficult than it sounds. English castles perhaps? Or England Castle. Or (england OR english) (castles or fortification) -"hill fort" instead? You quickly get the drift, I'm sure. Keeping it simple I get the name of a castle, a good image, a nice description and then it all falls to pieces. 'Country' is the next suggested information column, which is pretty redundant. Location is blank in all boxes, and List of places as the final column is meaningless. However, let's get rid of those and do something more sensible. County works quite well, but 'telephone' fails, giving me American numbers or nothing, as well as accurate results. 'Phone' works better, but gives different results to the 'telephone' option. Trying the combination of telephone OR phone results in zero results. How do I discover when building started for the castles? 'Begun' gives nothing, and 'started' is the same. 'Date' does give me dates in some instances, but they're all referring to other things. 'Built' however is much better and does give me something to work with. I also had better luck with entrance fees, since my first value 'ticket' wasn't too bad and only failed on 2 out of 7 castles.
This is the problem with Google squares - you have to work out appropriate terms, and yes I agree, you have to do this when you're searching, and if you get it right that's great, but if you get it wrong you have to choose another value and add it in or start again, and if you get two different values (as I did with the phone/telephone example) you've still got to go off and check. Moreover if you leave it up to Google to choose values there's no consistency or obvious way of working out what it's done.
You can save squares to your own Google account, but I didn't see a way of exporting the data anywhere else, which is just madness. If I was doing this 'for real' I can see that I'd need another tab opened or flick between browser and a spreadsheet package to pop the details in.
It's a lovely idea, but it simply does not work as it should. Even in beta it doesn't work, and far from reducing time spent constructing a matrix it just adds to it. I really wish Google had spent longer developing this before releasing it to disappointment, but then that's Google all over isn't it - why worry about quality when you can make a publicity splash? I do hope they continue to develop this application because with a little more work it could be genius. As it is, we're looking at another idea frittered away against a wall. Tragic.
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