• TechCrunch, Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:45 AM

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld says that one of the next big things in search is taking all of the unstructured data spread across the Web and making it searchable. "It is easier to get answers out of a database where everything is neatly labeled, stamped, and categorized," he says. Well, not surprisingly, Google is trying to tackle that problem with a new initiative called Google Squared, which was mentioned at the company's Searchology briefing yesterday.

Google Squared returns search results in a spreadsheet format, with the aim of structuring the unstructured data on Web pages. Michael Arrington uses the example of a search for Small Dogs, that returns results with names, description, size, weight, origin, etc., in columns and rows. This kind of search is applicable to many product searches, health-related searches, and scientific and mathematical searches, he says.

This is a similar approach to that being adopted by startup WolframAlpha, which has been getting a lot of press recently. Says Schonfeld: "Wolfram does a pretty good job parsing the information in its own databases, but those databases will never match what is available on the Web." Currently, Wolfram only stores a tiny fraction of what's available on the Web (10 terabytes), whereas Google processes 20,000 terabytes of data per day. "Turning the Web into a giant database will crush any attempt to segregate the 'best' information into a separate database so that it can be processed and searched more deeply."

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