Enbeeone3 : A Freelancer

Google introduces some important new features

by enbeeone3 on 18/05/09 at 12:27 pm

First Day of Spring

Hidden behind the inconspicuous link “Show options…” on the Google search engine result pages, lie a large number of new tools for refining search results.

Some two years ago Google (GOOG) introduced Universal Search, which essentially means that the search results combine various types of content: web, images, video, news and blogs.

The good thing about this is that inexperienced searchers may, at once glance, see results of all these types.

Universal Search also fulfills the Google credo of keeping search engine result pages simple and uncluttered.

However, it does make it harder for searchers to focus their search on one type of information.

Search options

If you click on the “Show options” link (which you find right under the Google logo on the English language versions of Google), Google will add a left hand column to the result page.

It looks a little bit like the one Ask had before they decided to become more like Google.

The column presents four sections with tools for refining your search. The first bullet point on each section is the default choice for a regular search.

When you click on one of the options, Google will filter the results accordingly, adding new options to the menu according to what kind of information you are looking for. If you click on video, Google will — for instance — add options for different durations.

Types of sources

• All results
• Video
  (restricts results to videos indexed by Google Video Search, including YouTube)
• Forums
  (restricts results to information found in discussion forums)
• Reviews
  (restricts results to pages that Google believe contain reviews of products, sites or services. These are most likely identified by Google finding the word “review” on the page.

Note that Google does not include options for News or Images, probably because these are options listed at the very top of the pages.

Why Google has singled out Videos for the option list, in spite of the fact that Videos are listed at the top of the page as well is unclear. The results are not identical!

Moreover, we find it baffling that Blogs are not included as a separate options. To restrict results to blogs you have to click on the “more” link at the top of the page, which is far from intuitive.

This section also presents the most glaring omission, namely real time search from social media.

We would have liked to see an option that mixed results from Twitter and other microblogs with the latest blog search results, which is why we believe Google acquiring Twitter would be a good thing.

Restrict result by time

The next section focuses on the timeline:

• Any time
  (i.e. default search results)
• Recent results
  (restricts results to information found in the last few hours)
• Past 24 hours
• Past week
• Past year

Bullet point two and three could be considered some kind of news search function, but while the Google News Search only includes results from hand picked sites, these results seem to give you data from various Google indexes, at least when you have selected “All results” in section 1.

More info on each hit

The next section is basically an option that lets you decide how Google is presenting the results. That being said, the ranking of results may be different for the different options.

• Standard results
  (gives you a mix of results from different Google indexes in the traditional way: headline, snippet and URL)
• Images from the page
  (presents one or two images from each web page listed)
• More text
  (is identical to Standard results, but adds longer snippets from the page)

Especially the last option might be helpful, as it might save you from visiting a large number of web pages in order to identify the most relevant ones.

We would love to have thumbnail viwe of the search results as an option as well.

Refining the search query

The final section gives you ways of exploring the web by helping you rephrase the query.

• Standard view
• Related searches
  (adds a list of alternative search queries at the top)
• Wonder Wheel
  (adds a “wheel” with subtopics at the end of the spokes. Click on one of the subtopics and Google will narrow your search accordingly)
• Timeline
  (lets you restrict your search result to a certain publication date or a date in history. A search for “Chinese Art” may, for instance, gives you pages about art from 3000BC, while you may narrow a search for “search engine marketing” to the year of 2004.)

All in all we think Google has done great job with developing these options.

Rich snippets

Google has also added so called “Rich Snippets” to some search results.

As Google puts it:

“Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help you quickly identify the relevance of your results.”

The rich snippets appear, like the old fashioned text snippets, below the title of the search result and may include review information, prices, information that helps you distinguish between people and more.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can add to your own web pages. The Google Blog has more on how you can do that.

Google Squared

Google is also planning another new alternative way of presenting search results called Google Squared.

Google Squared will present results in a spreadsheet format that can be edited and saved. In other words: You may use the search results as you would a database.