Why I Still Think It Was a Bad Idea to Make Google Squared Public

After Google Squared officially became public last week, the entire blogosphere has been full of various examples of how strange its results can actually be. Of course we were all told that this is merely an experiment and only the first step of making the web structured instead of surfing through multiple web pages to find the information you actually need.

Google Squared sounded like a very good idea because of course it feels very good if you know that you can get a quick understanding of a subject just by typing one request and looking at the spreadsheet generated by Google Squared. To me it sounded somewhat like Wikipedia: you know you can rarely trust its pages 100% but they can be an excellent starting point of a further research as there are plenty of links to further reading. Google Squared offers exactly that: a quick view of the general information on a subject to move further and deeper on your own elsewhere.

But the problem is that Google Squared produces so many ridiculous errors that it is quite difficult to focus on how good the idea behind the new tool is as you mostly notice the errors and just can’t ignore them. And since according to Jason Kincaid I was among the bloggers who were “mean spirited” enough to mention Google Squared flaws, like declaring the current Russian president dead in my case, I thought that I’d explain why exactly I still feel it was not such a good idea for Google to let the entire world play with the tool at this early stage.

And the most important reason is that people happen to rely on Google. So of course when bloggers mention such examples, there are always commentators who remind us that this is a very early version that is not even in beta but is in Labs so it should be discussed exactly like this. Just in case, I have just checked to see how many of the Google products still bear the ‘beta’ tag and it so happens that a lot of them still do: Alerts, Blog Search, Scholar, Docs, Calendar, and, finally, Gmail and Google Reader.

And even if we get occasional downtimes or problems with products from this impressive list, I guess everyone will agree that we usually expect them to do what they promise to do and many of us keep our important information in these products without any backup versions elsewhere (I guess there are many people out there who don’t download their emails from Gmail or export their OPML files from Reader just in case their feeds get lost somehow).

So it is visible that even when a Google’s product is tagged with “beta”, it does not mean that people will not expect it to be good. In fact, people usually expect everything that is launched by Google to be good simply because the company has the reputation of the most powerful online empire that will hardly offer us anything that should not be trusted.

And of course this fact is absolutely true for everything about search: after all, Google is such a household brand in web search that we just expect it to be the leader in the field. So it is no wonder that we believe that when Google further innovates the field of search and offers something new to us, we simply consider it to be good from the very beginning.

Right now the situation with Squared reminds me a little of Google’s Chrome browser getting out of beta: while it was very obvious that the product was a very early beta, it was still dragged out of beta to gain customers’ trust and numerous downloads that Google needed so much - even though everyone understands Chrome was far from ready for the prime time.

Now Google has decided that Google Squared deserves to be made public even though it produces correct results much less frequently than it comes up with totally wrong ones. And while of course it must be good for Google to gather a group (possibly large) of enthusiasts to play with the product for a few months to help improve it with our feedback and tweaks of the search results, I think it’s not exactly a good idea to make it totally public - because people who happen to see “Google” and the familiar search field will hardly want to check and double-check search results. After all, not so many people dare to question Google search results and prefer to believe what we get instead.