Google labs has recently launched a new product called Google Squared - it extracts data from web pages and displays the search results in a grid format. What Google squared does is that it structures the unstructured data on web pages. When you give a search query, it essentially searches the web to find the facts, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way.

For example, if you do a search for “small cars”, it returns results in a tabular format with the headings:

Names

Images

Transmission

Year

Class

Furthermore, if you want to customize the search result, it is possible to add columns.  In this case, you can add columns like Manufacturer, Height, width, length etc. You can also delete rows and columns that you do not want in the square.

Sources from Google say that “It takes an incredible amount of compute power to create one of those squares,” There are a lot of features that can be incorporated like sorting, filtering etc. Look out for more features that will be added in the days to come.

Google Squared can prove useful for targeted searches like product search, health search, scientific searches etc. Getting back structured results is definitely a major new direction for search.

Check out how Google describes the new service.