Square your search results with Google Squared

Some information is easy to find. If you want to learn the rules of golf, you can search Google for [golf rules] and we'll return a list of relevant web sites right at the top. But not all your information needs are that simple. Some questions can be more complex, requiring you to visit ten, perhaps twenty websites to research and collect what you need.

For instance, I'm a big fan of roller coasters. In the past I've used Google to search for information about roller coasters, such as which ones are the tallest, fastest, and have the most loops. Finding this information used to take multiple searches — I'd find roller coaster sizes on one website, heights on another, and speeds on a third. By manually comparing the sites, I could get the information I was looking for, but it took some time. With Google Squared, a new feature just released in Google Labs, I can find my roller coaster facts almost instantly.

Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.

While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it's far more difficult for computers to do automatically. Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way.

This technology is by no means perfect. That's why we designed Google Squared to be conversational, enabling you to respond to the initial result and get a better answer. If there's another row or column you'd like to see, you can add it and Google Squared will automatically attempt to fetch and fill in the relevant facts for you. As you remove rows and columns you don't like, Google Squared will get a fresh idea of what you're interested in and suggest new rows and columns to add. See it in action in the video below:



If you click on any fact, you'll see the sources Google Squared gathered it from as well as a list of other possible values that you can investigate. So even if your square isn't perfect at the beginning, it's easy to work with Google Squared to get a better answer in no time. Once you've got a square you're happy with, you can save it and come back to it later.

To give Google Squared a whirl, try searching for [planets] or [romantic movies]. You can try out Google Squared now in Google Labs.

Posted by Alex Komoroske, Associate Product Manager for Google Squared

Tour the homepages of your favorite celebrities

Have you ever wondered what celebrities do when they use the web? Today, we're announcing the new iGoogle Showcase, which allows you to see and share the homepages of some of your favorite icons. These 30 preeminent people, including Dave Matthews, Rachael Ray and Katie Couric, are sharing their iGoogle pages with you in full so you can get a glimpse into their interests and how they experience the web.

The iGoogle Showcase allows you to either add a celebrity's entire iGoogle page to your own, or browse through the collection and choose different gadgets and themes from several pages. For example, you might select Al Gore's iGoogle page for his preferred theme and gadgets for keeping up on the latest media news, supporting the Alliance for Climate protection cause or browsing through photos from National Geographic.



In addition, many of our celebrity partners have created their own custom iGoogle gadgets to easily connect with their fans every day. If you're a Ryan Seacrest fan, his new gadget can help you keep up with all the latest entertainment news. You can follow his tweets, watch exclusive videos, listen to radio interviews, and view his photo albums. Donald Trump offers advice to entrepreneurs, Martha Stewart shares recipes and tips, and Anderson Cooper delivers headline news and extras from his CNN show AC360.

To get any one of our celebrity themes or gadgets on your own iGoogle page, visit the iGoogle Showcase. We've all heard about "six degrees of separation," but now, some of your favorite stars are just a few clicks away.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience

Search billions of documents with the Google Search Appliance 6.0

It's hard to conceptualize the number 1,000,000,000. One billion sheets of paper could circle the earth at the equator well over five times. Counting to one billion would take about 30 years of your life, even if you never stop to sleep. And if you had to find a single piece of information by sorting through a billion documents it would take you, on average, about 2000 years. Businesses and large organizations have tons of documents and other types of data — some even have a billion documents that need searching, and it's unlikely that employees have 2000 years to dedicate to the hunt.

Figuring out how to navigate the complex content systems of large organizations is a tough problem, one we've dedicated years to solving. Today we're releasing the newest version of our solution, the Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA), which has the capacity to search billions of documents. So whether you own a small business with a few thousand docs or belong to a huge organization with a billion, the GSA can search them all. Even if the content you need lives in a bunch of different departments or locations, in all kinds of formats, languages and repositories, the GSA makes searching within your organization as simple as searching on Google.com. It also has helpful features like user-added results and query suggestions, so over time your coworkers' input improves search results. The GSA 6.0 also is full of customization features, as well as flexible security policies so that each enterprise or large organizations can tweak the settings to suit its needs. We believe that setting your enterprise up with the GSA can save you tons of employee hours spent looking for data — letting you focus on the actual work to be done.

We demonstrated the infrastructure you'd actually need to search a billion docs — check it out in the video below. To learn more about the GSA 6.0 or our search solutions for businesses, check out the Google Enterprise Blog or our website.




Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager

The Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors

If you're a local business owner, it's likely that Google plays a role in helping customers find you. And we're not just talking about your website — thanks to Google Maps and Google Search, you may also be getting a lot of online traffic to your business listing. You've probably seen one of these listings before:

You also probably know how they tend to work: A potential customer does a search on Google.com or in Google Maps, comes across your listing, clicks on it to see your reviews and details, and then gets directions to your location.

Now, imagine if there were a way for you to get a better understanding of how those customers are finding you. Did they search for "pizza" or "pasta" to get to the listing for your Italian restaurant? Do they live across town, but drive miles for your great selection of camping gear? What happens to traffic to your new dental practice when you start advertising in the local paper? With information like that, you'd be able to make better informed decisions on how to drive more traffic to your listing and attract more customers.

Later today, you'll be able to do just that, thanks to a new dashboard feature we're launching in the Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc). The LBC is a free tool that enables business owners to control the content of their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps. All you have to do is claim your listing in the LBC and go through a quick verification process to get access to the following kinds of data:

• Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
• Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business' website or requested driving directions to the business.
• Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for "tea" or "coffee"?
• Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.

The new dashboard will also let you dig into that data using all kinds of lists, maps, and graphs like this one, which measures impressions and actions for a hotel's business listing:



When you sign in to the LBC today, you'll find that we've already populated the dashboards for claimed listings with data from the last 30 days. After that, new information will be added every day, so you can check in often to see how things are going. We're also working hard to add more historical information, and to make this available for businesses outside the U.S. All the data we share through the dashboard will be anonymous and aggregated, to protect the privacy of Google users.

We're really excited to be able to open up this data to local business owners. Before now, you could track usage metrics on your website using a tool like Google Analytics, but data about how customers found you in other ways never got back to you. That all changes today, and we think business owners will really get a lot out of this new information. So if you're a local business owner and you feel the same way, be sure to check out this new dashboard.

To learn more about accessing and using the dashboard, take a look at the video below and then visit the Lat Long Blog for a more in-depth overview.



Posted by Amer Shahnawaz, Software Engineer, Local Business Center

Blog search and beyond

Since we launched the Custom Search AJAX gadget for Blogger on our experimental site, we've gotten some great feedback. Now, the tuned-up search gadget is available to all Blogger users. You can configure this gadget to help your readers search all the information that's relevant to your blog — your posts, webpages that you link to, and sites that you link to from the sidebar — all in one shot. When your readers search using this gadget, the results are displayed with the look and feel of your blog. And they show up inline, so readers don't have to leave your blog. After they're done, they can quickly dismiss the results and go back to reading your blog posts. Take a look at how S. Krishna's Books uses the gadget.


You can configure the gadget on your blog with just a few clicks:

• Edit your blog's layout, and click "Add a Gadget"
• Select and configure the search box gadget

The search box will then show up on the sidebar on your blog.


By default, the following 3 search tabs are configured:

• This blog: searches across your blog posts
• Linked from here: searches blog posts, webpages linked from your posts, blog lists, and link lists
• The web: searches across all pages on the web

The gadget also provides an option that lets you restrict search results to pages linked from a specific blog list or link list. For example, if you have many link lists on your sidebar, you can choose to surface only the most important ones in specific search tabs. "Linked from here" includes pages from all of them.

The goal of this gadget is to expand the search capabilities of your blog and give your readers a better search experience. If you're using it, we'd love to hear your feedback on other improvements we can make. Learn more at the Custom Search Blog.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager