Google is well-known for changing the way people search on the Internet. However, that does not mean that they are not trying to improve the search experience even more.
Enriching the search results
One of the fundamental ideas for improving the search experience is that the list of search results is ‘enriched’. So instead of giving you results that point to web sites and other sources, they add additional information to the results page. A well-known example is giving the location of organizations in Google Maps (see picture below), for example for musea in Amsterdam.
Another example is that Google is not only pointing to the homepage when you look for a well-known company. In addition to the domain name, it also provides links to popular content in your web site. In other words, Google is taking over your primary navigation!
Google Squared
The latest tool Google has added is Google Squared. The main idea is that you do not get a list of search results. Instead, you get a table of facts from several sources on the Web, for any topic you specify. Let’s take the “amsterdam museum” example again (see picture below).
These “Squares”can be customized by adding items and attributes you are interested in. In addition, you can see where Google got the information from and go to the relevant sources. Finally, the Squares can be shared with others.
Making things easier
So what do we think of Google Squared? Does it really improve the search experience for Google users? Right now, when you look for a museum in Amsterdam, you get a list of search results. This makes it necessary to go to the web sites of the individual museums and look for information such as opening hours and price information. This process can take up some time before the information is found within those web sites depending on their ease of use.
However, when looking for the same information in Google Squared an organised overview of various information is given such as the available musea, opening hours and addresses. To find out more information such as price or any other information another column can easily be added. So at least for some search queries, the Squares enrich the search results. We expect that this experimental tool has potential to develop in a popular functionality that will save the users of Google a lot of time finding and organising the information they are looking for.
We look forward what other handy tools Google will bring out more. Try out this tool and start Squaring the information you are looking for yourself!