The Best Books… Squared

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.)