Google today launched Google Squared, “an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet”, according to the official Google blog.  In theory, Google Squared aims to prevent the need to search across numerous websites to find the information that they need – instead, results are presented in an easy-to-use topic format.

Its an interesting idea and one that’s bound to become more useful as it develops, but Google admits that its far from perfect.  For that reason, Google Squared allows for user feedback.  Not happy with your results?  Then add another column and Google will try to find appropriate matching information.

Google Squared search for "Emily Dickenson"

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market.

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Google has become the by-word for search for a large percentage of Internet users to the extent that the company has come to define the concept.  In fact, Google has the market so sown up that there has been little in the way of new consumer-based search products for a number of years.

However, Wolfram Alpha hopes to change all of that.  Wolfram Alpha is “a computational knowledge engine … akin to a fact engine, a way to look for facts or stats. It “is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.”

Sounds great and should be useful for a number of subjects.  For example, a search for “x^3-4x^2+6x-24=0″ provides the following results:

Here’s a couple of other searches: