Google Squared is a semantic search tool from Google extracting structured data from across the web and presenting its results in spreadsheet-like format. Each search query return a table of search results which has its own set of columns – common attributes that are associated with the topic of a search.
A while back Ricardo Vidal took Google Squared for a spin using various topics in genetics (his testdrive is here). Now let’s take the opportunity to test Google Squared on what’s near and dear to me – evolutionary biologists.
And the result is…
Not bad at all for a brain-less algorithm. It nails most of my top picks for evolutionary biologists. Perhaps the most glaring omissions would be that Alfred Russel Wallace, J.B.S. Haldane, George Gaylord Simpson, Sewall Wright, W.D. Hamilton are not on the list. For comparison, a more extensive list of evolutionary biologists can be found on Wikipedia.
This is from the “Mario’s Entangled Bank” blog (http://pineda-krch.com) of Mario Pineda-Krch, a theoretical biologist at the University of Alberta.
