DISQUS

Miramon · 6 months ago

Squared is just godawful and should never have been released to the public. If it was not a labs toy it would be a worse embarrassment than Cuil. The columns are just never right, and clearly have no semantic basis whatsoever.

I'm guessing that for any query the system extracts random entities from a single site's text, and makes columns out of that; and then of course it generally turns out that all the other sites looked at don't have any of those kind of entities, so most of the columns are almost always blank, and usually have ludicrously bad headings in any event.

This is a poster-child example why you can't use the same tool for every job. Emergence of meaningful results from vast amounts of data is the Google hallmark, but it just fails badly in this case. This is one of those problems that seem to be AI-hard, or at least to require a strong AI approach.

Wolfram Alpha uses handcrafted curated solutions to special problem categories, which makes it less than generally useful, but it still works sometimes on some things. Google Squared, using its data-intensive but zero-AI approach, is useful even less of the time, which is really an amazing achievement in its way.

Anthony Ha · 6 months ago

Obviously, I'm not quite as down on Squared as you are, but this is still a wonderful bit of invective.

nairsats · 4 months ago

Google Squared appears to be similar to my patent application:

Frankly, I am getting a Déjà vu effect while going through the “Google Squared” application because it appears to be very similar in function to my United States patent application which was filed on April 12, 2007 and as publicly disclosed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 16, 2008, when the patent application was published.

My patent application is titled as “Method And System For Research Using Computer Based Simultaneous Comparison And Contrasting Of A Multiplicity Of Subjects Having Specific Attributes Within Specific Contexts” bearing Document Number “20080256023” and Inventor name “Nair Satheesh” which may be viewed at http://patft.uspto.gov/ upon Patent Applications: Quick Search.

Google Squared appears to be using at least some if not many of the same methods and systems as set forth by me more than two years ago in my patent application. In fact there are many more methods and systems disclosed in my patent application which I believe will help resolve certain inaccuracies found in current Google Squared application.

I have issued legal notices to Google through my Patent Attorney in the US but Google has not responded yet to any of my notices.