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Earlier today, the Google introduced “Squared,” a new Google Labs tool that should help users perform new kinds of Web searches, and particularly comparative search on a specific topic, in a significantly faster and easier way without forcing the user to manually pick and compare different bits of information from previous search results.

Google Squared does not provide a list of links to Web pages like traditional search engines do, but rather presents the information gathered by its internal algorithms in a grid called “square” with which the user can interact by adding, removing or editing one or more columns and saving the results of the edits.

“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,” a Google spokesman wrote on the company’s official blog. “If your square isn’t perfect at the beginning, it’s easy to work with Google Squared to get a better answer.”

Apart from the ability to add new rows and colums, users can also type the name for them and have the tool attempt to fill in the missing data. Moreover, Google also offers up to five relevant suggestions as to what relevant colums can be added. Finally, users can also start with an empty “square” and complete the form to specify what information to display in the grid.

Square is currently accessible at this address from within Google Labs. The tool, which some have compared to Wolfram Alpha, was however conceived with a very different aim as it is an aggregator of information gathered on the Web rather than, like Alpha has been defined, a “knowledge computation engine”.

“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,” Alex Komoroske, Associate Product Manager for Google Squared, wrote on Google’s blog.

“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,” Komoroske further explained, also pointing out that all sources for the information gathered are being displayed once the user hovers the mouse on the cell of interest, which enables users to verify the information for themselves.

While long queries currently yield very poor results with this tool, short and relatively popular queries return results that can already prove useful to the average user, saving him or her a considerable amount of time in gathering the information by hand.