Google Squared Is No Freebase-Killer

Now that the Google Squared site is public, it’s a little more clear that the site is comparable to a Freebase view.

Freebase has iteratively improved its View interface for a couple of years and super-classed it with the Bases feature, so it is generally more full-featured to Google Squared, although the responsive minimalism of Google Squared could make it a better interface for mobile devices.

And yet, despite Google’s resources, Freebase has a major advantage in that it is solely focused on interfaces for its data, and it comes up with all kinds of clever ways of improving the data. A perfect example would be the announcement today on its blog:

New on our topic page: help us type untyped topics

The announcement is that Freebase is now using human intelligence to confirm estimations about the types of untyped topics, using Wikipedia Categories. This is something we’ve been discussing with the Freebase Team for a while, but it’s a total surprise that this is now a live feature on thousands of Freebase topic pages.

Already having done some work using Wikipedia categories to supplement Freebase topic data, I’m going to be very eager to follow this confirmation feature, and see if there is a way to ombine it with the new eMQL adapters.

Update: The source code for the Typewriter app is available, but it lacks documentation on the mechanics behind the estimations.