Google Squared was released June 3 and is the latest experiment to come out of Google Labs exploring how to give users more meaningful and structured Searches. Erick Schonfield on Tech Crunch summed it up well: “Puts Web Search into a Spreadsheet”.

The new application gives you the same search results but can break them down by your own topical categories. There are some pre – built squares that Google have put together as examples. The British Poets will give you a list of different poets and certain pieces of info on each one like City of Birth. The Squared engine can pull up images, text excerpts to fit with the categories and saves you the trip to five different Wikipedia pages.

There has been some discussion that Squared was created to try and crush Wolfram Alpha the ‘knowledge engine’ but the two products are quite different. One key difference being that Wolfram Alpha computes answers based on keyword strings where as Squared is more an exploration on how to filter and display data sets.

Still Google Squared, Wolfram Alpha and Bing and other recent forays into the development of the semantic web signal the beginning of the Web 3.0 era which Tom Tague; VP of Solutions and Marketing at Clear Forest, described as “cleaning up the mess we made and harvesting the value of Web 2.0.” (from here)

Build you own square here.