A few months ago, Google launched an experimental new search project, called Google Squared, that literally tries to take all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and put it into neat little, labeled boxes.

It is still very much in Labs, but today it got better. Google Squared can now deal with four times as many squares of data, 120 up from 30. Columns can now be sorted, and results can be exported into Google Spreadsheets were the data can be played manipulated, charted, and so forth.

While Google Squared is much better, it is nowhere near ready for mass consumption. If you do a search for “planets,” for instance (see screenshot), it fails to identify Mars in its grid. The first result is Pluto, which officially is no longer a planet. While I too am still resisting the deplanetization of Pluto because of my emotional attachment to it, Google as a cold-hearted, just-the-facts-ma’am search engine doesn’t have the same excuse. And it is not just Pluto, it also lists Ceres (another planet also-ran), Jupiter’s moon Io, and the Asteroid Belt (which most definitely is not a planet). Mars definitely needs to go in there before the Asteroid Belt.

Is this the best Google can do against Wolfram Alpha and other newfangled search engines which also take advantage of structured data to present a deep set of facts for every query? Search for “planets” on Wolfram and it correctly identifies all eight (minus Pluto) including Mars

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Google’s ‘unexplained phenomenon’ is generating lots of buzz this weekend. The company had done nothing but change its logo to a variant where one of the two O’s in its name was seemingly being abducted by an alien spaceship and tweet out a cryptic message that was translated “All Your O are belong to us,” a play on the good old “All your base are belong to us” meme. But it sure got people talking.

The Telegraph thought it had solved the mystery, but Andrew Healey begged to differ and offered multiple alternative answers and why they were all wrong. Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan got a vague statement from Google about the whole ordeal which mentioned an update would be coming in the following weeks.

This statement and the translated version of the Google Korea blog post about it (thanks GoogleUnexplainedPhenomenon.com) led us and many others to believe this is likely the first of a series of hints that Google will be using to provide clues to a puzzle.

And TechCrunch reader x pete offered a really good lead in the comments of our earlier post that could well have solved the mystery early.

Check out the website for the O Campaign, which is a “non-profit campaign forging alliances between the public, academia, corporations, and institutions in effort to efficiently channel resources for high-paced development of cutting-edge research in cancer prevention”. Looks like something Google would be involved with, right?

Now check out who is co-directing this admirable campaign: Thalas’ Joseph James Jung, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philantropist who currently spends his time collaborating with chief executives and boards of selected companies, universities and organizations. The first company that gets mentioned in his bio? You guessed it: Google.

Is this the explanation for the unexplained phenomenon and will Google be symbolically donating one of the letters of its company name to the campaign? Or just another wild stab in the dark?

The truth is out there, and we’re clearly not the only ones looking for it.

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Digg announced a seemingly small, but rather interesting change on its blog today: It has added a “rel=nofollow” tag to every link on the site that it doesn’t trust. What this means is that all the spammers who submit their stories to Digg, are now basically out of luck.

Sure, all spammer who submit something to Digg hope that it hits the frontpage and brings a rush of traffic. But more important to them are the links associated with Digg. If a story is popular on Digg, it will also likely garner quite a few links back to it. But even if it doesn’t become popular, the link coming from Digg itself gives some weight to the spammy URL in a search engine crawler’s eyes.

Digg using nofollow has been a subject of debate since at least 2007, when the service was exploding with popularity. Around that time, Wikipedia decided to use nofollow for all of its outbound links. But what’s interesting here is that Digg isn’t adding nofollow to all of its links, and instead is only doing it for the untrusted ones.

“This work was done in consultation with leading experts from the SEO/SEM and link spam fields, in an effort to lookout for the interests of content providers and the Digg community,” Digg’s John Quinn writes today. This would seem to suggest that company realizes it’s still in the interest of most content providers to get the link juice that comes from Digg. It would also seem to suggest that it doesn’t want firestorm of controversy similar to the one it created with the DiggBar.

This move comes at an interesting time for Digg, as sites like Bit.ly look to be setting up to battle for who has the most interesting link data on the Internet. Twitter itself has been testing out the tracking of links from its site, though it claims to be just doing so for internal product purposes.

How Digg judges which sites they trust, they don’t say. But one would have to assume that these sites are different from the ones that are straight-up blocked from the service for being spammy. Untrusted links in comments, profiles and story pages will also get the nofollow tag as well.

[photo: flickr/brianware3000]

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