Suppose that you need to collect data on English castles, to include an image, description and details on a nearby town. Unless you've got a helpful book to hand (!) it might take a while to drag all of this information together. Then of course you remember that you also want phone numbers, which means you've got to go back and do the searching again. How about British poets, African countries or roller coasters? It's a time consuming and probably in some cases a fairly boring task.
This is where Google wants to help you out, with Google Squared.
The idea is simple - you tell it what you want to find, it creates a matrix filled with goodies based on what it discovers. You can then add in new factors according to taste, and Google will then go off and find the required data and slot it in for you. This turns a 30 minute job into a 3 minute breeze. Or... (pregnant pause) does it?
Let's go through an example - I've chosen English Castles, mainly because it's a subject that's close to my heart. This is the matrix that gets formed as a result of the two word search:
There's actually a total of 13 castles, which is a reasonable number to start me off; I can delete any of them, and add in others. The content is pulled from various resources - Wikipedia, specific castle home pages and so on - the searcher really doesn't have any control over this, so Google really does need to come up trumps here. Most of the time I think it does - I'm getting good initial data about Kenilworth for example, although the Hever Castle content is much more of a sales pitch, but it is pulled from the castle website.
The fourth column is 'country' which seems rather redundant give the nature of search, but it is concerning to see that the Tower of London has been relocated into the United States. To be fair however, a mouseover of that cell does show that the information is regarded as being low confidence, and I'm given three other options:
However, I'm still not impressed with the options available - 'London' would be helpful and to be honest, the clue rather IS in the name.
That's all that Google Squared turns up for me, but it's possible to add in other data options, and this is what Google is offering me:
I think these are reasonable options, and of course I can add my own. Choosing 'telephone' gets Google to fill in 9 cells for me, but these are all listed as 'low confidence' - understandable in the case of the Tower of London, since the number given is that of a named doctor working at Guy's Tower, Guy's Hospital, London. Really not acceptable at all. This is where Google Squared breaks down, catastrophically. I have to go through each cell in turn, checking and double checking, and even though the source of the data is given - I still have to check it all again anyway. Google isn't saving me time at this point - it's actually costing me time, since I reckon that I could find good quality authoritative data quicker myself than going through each option and checking myself.
I tried to add in other data options, such as 'purpose', 'disabled access', 'architectural style' and 'public transport'. Some of these were my own ideas, others were suggestions by Google. All met with total failure - the one which made me laugh the most was Public transport for Kenilworth castle is apparently:
Oh dear.
In case I was just being difficult (always a possibility with me!) I tried some of Google's own suggestions. To say 'laughably inept' is to be on the kind side. Let's take a brief look at their idea of British poets:
Jeremy Reed? The description itself says '...an American professional baseball player'. I have no idea where Google's got that from - a search in their own database doesn't turn this guy up. All that I can think is that in the Wikipedia there's a reference to Jeremy Reed, described thus: "Jersey-born writer Jeremy Reed is a British poet and prose stylist." Perhaps Google pulled that from one place, re-ran the search elsewhere and came up with that. Really, this is about as stupid as pig dribble.
They're not all this bad, and in fact the 'Romantic movies' one is actually quite good. However, none of them are good enough - not even close to it. Suggested columns are hit and miss at best, information is missing in most cases, all the information needs to be doublechecked and in some cases it's so bad a blindfolded senile monkey could do better.
Google - take this away and bring it back when it works please. I love the concept, but the execution is dreadful; you should be ashamed.
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