Google Squared made its debut yesterday as a Google Labs project at google.com/squared. Honestly, it is very cool to use and has a lot of potential. But it is also extremely risky and often shows very poor results.
Google Squared tries to take the unstructured nature of crawling the web and making it into structure data. In some cases it does a nice job, but in many cases, it fails completely or it shows false information.
Since I had a kid recently, I decided to search for jewish schools to send her to. The thing is, it only listed one Jewish school. It should have listed hundreds, but it did not. I understand, possibly the Jewish school web sites are built incredibly poor from a search friendly standpoint that Google could not extract the content from it to include it in a square.
So I moved on and I search for jewish newspapers to potentially advertise RustyBrick's Jewish iPhone Apps in. We got a neat ad by the way. That search worked pretty well.
As a searcher, you need to be aware that Google Squared is useful but you need to know that the data can be seriously flawed. We discussed the dangerous of snippets earlier, and it applies directly here. Over time, I suspect it will get better, but it might take a lot of time.
As an SEO, you should realize that building search friendly sites will only help Google understand your sites and structure it in Google Squared. Is that a good thing? That is up to debate. In any event, if Google remains dominate, which seems like it will for at least the near future, you need to make sure to play their game. Will rich snippets play a roll in this? Maybe. But search engine friendly design, seems key to me.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
