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Google Squared results for "Jon Stewart" show it does not watch The Daily Show.

I'm helping garden blogger Pat Feinstein identify her ferns using the new Google Squared's "structured data" search: ferns. Browsable, with photos, Squared's cultural knowledge is a bit sketchy, but Google hopes that, with help from the hivemind (that includes you), it will become more useful.

I asked what it knew about cooking brown rice in a crockpot -- which baffled Wolfram Alpha -- and it failed rather well:

Google Squared couldn't automatically build a Square about cook brown rice in a crockpot. But don't give up yet!

Start a Square by entering up to 5 example items below.

example: Planets

Venus
Mercury
Earth
Jupiter

Were there any way for me to think up such a list, it would try to analyze what my examples have in common, and extend that.

It delivered rather more results in science and tech: std, string theory and "structured data" (of course).

Georgia O'Keeffe fares well, although search results, pictured above, for The Daily Show's Jon Stewart stray into It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie at IMDB and a Wikipedia entry for George Bush.

"Tomatoes" yielded just four results -- three types of tomato such as Brandywine, and Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze video. (?)

There is just one result for the Patriots' Tom Brady, a link to 2002's Super Bowl XXXVI at Wikipedia.

Google knows its Squared isn't too smart yet. Square your search results with Google Squared at the Official Google Blog explains,

Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet...

While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it's far more difficult for computers to do automatically. Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way...

This technology is by no means perfect. That's why we designed Google Squared to be conversational, enabling you to respond to the initial result and get a better answer....

You'll be teaching it, if you fill in your blanks. You'll notice that every search page invites you to "Add to this Square."

Related: E.T., Why Don't You Just Call?

"We'll find ET within two dozen years," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, proclaimed in a speech at the California Institute of Technology. Shostak went on to say that he not only has a pretty good hunch about how long it could take, he thinks he knows what ET will be like.

But don't expect him to look like us.

"I think that if there's a conscious intelligence out there, it's synthetic," Shostak added. He's talking robots, folks. The argument goes like this: Darwinian evolution is a very slow process, and although it probably has occurred on many planets, it has it's limitations -- like us. Technological evolution, by contrast, can advance at warp speed, as we've all seen in the computers that are out of date by the time we get them out of the box.

They probably view us as intelligent meat.