Google Squared is one of those beta ideas made by Google Labs. It’s a different way of searching for things which shows your results organised into rows and columns. Here’s an example for the search ‘dog breeds‘. As you can see, this makes search results much better in certain cases, especially when searching for a ‘group’ of items.

We take for granted sometimes that children can search effectively, even though ‘to Google’ is a verb integral to their language. By using Google Squared the results of the search are structured in a much better way.

However, sometimes there will be gaps in the results columns, or information that is, shall we say, unreliable! This provides the teacher with a good way of letting the children decide on what should be filled in in those gaps or whether the information is really necessary for what they are doing at all.

Lots of things to try at Google Labs; this is just one I happened across and saw an instant benefit in the classroom.