One of the more exciting recent search engine advances I’ve seen in a while is Google Squared. Search for something which has multiple attributes and Google will try to build a structured table of results, adding columns for each major attribute it knows about. As an example, try “Hitchcock films”.

Figure 1: Google Squared search results for “hitchcock film”

Did Google miss a film? Just add a row and Google will try to fill in the missing attributes. Is a film attribute missing? Just choose from a column suggestion Google offers or specify it yourself and Google will try to find the data. Does a data element seem amiss? Hover over it and Google will display the data source along with alternative values. In the Hitchcock example, one film was reported with the re-release date rather than the original date; a click or two later and the correct date appeared.

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Already master in the acquisition and management of mostly unstructured data¹, whether it be web pages or word processing documents, Google is now taking on structured data as well.

Google Base, currently only available in English, allows users to insert data items which become searchable through a form at base.google.com.

16 types of data to insert – or specify your own

Items can be posted using templates for predefined Google Base item types (16 currently: blogs, coupons, course schedules, events and activities, jobs, news and articles, people profiles, products, recipes, reference articles, reviews, services, vehicles, wanted ads, rentals and, of all things, comic books). Alternatively, Google Base allows the definition of new item types and their associated data elements.

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