Lists

The Best Books… Squared

By posted at 4:25 pm on June 3, 2009 1

You may have heard of Google Squared. It’s a new service in development from Google that, as Wikipedia puts it, “extracts structured data from across the web and presents its results in spreadsheet-like format.” Basically, it returns your results in a list-like format with some additional descriptive columns.

Trying it out, we naturally entered some book-related queries. And, if you assume that Google has compiled a database of the world’s knowledge and uses that to generate its results, then these must be – definitively – the “best books” and “best novels” ever.

Best Books:

  1. The Catcher in the Rye
  2. Catch-22
  3. Animal Farm
  4. The Very Hungry Caterpillar
  5. Goodnight Moon
  6. Curious George
  7. Gravity’s Rainbow

Best Novels:

  1. Gravity’s Rainbow
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird
  3. The Sound and the Fury
  4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  5. The Lord of the Rings
  6. To The Lighthouse
  7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Not bad for something computer-generated.

(Google has been known to personalize and regularly adjust its results, so your lists may vary.)

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One Response to “The Best Books… Squared”

  1. Lydia Kiesling
    at 5:19 pm on June 3, 2009

    Kind of surprised ol' Ayn Rand didn't make the spreadsheet.

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