Google ‘searchology’ event unveils more search options
Tuesday 12 May 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter
On Tuesday this week (12 May), Internet giant Google hosted its second 'searchology' event, a platform the company uses to update its users, partners and customers about its progress in search issues.
At the inaugural searchology event two years ago, Google launched Universal Search, a feature that blended different types of results – web pages, images, videos, books and so on – on the results page. Since then, the Google bods have spent a lot of time looking at how they can get a better understanding of the diverse range of information on the Internet, in order to be able to direct users more quickly to the types of information they are really looking for.
At this week's searchology, Google has unveiled a new set of features that it's calling Search Options. These are essentially tools that enable users, in Google's parlance, to 'slice and dice' their results by generating different views to help find what they want more quickly and easily. These tools – which are accessible simply by clicking on 'Show options…' in the blue bar of Google's results page – help users to filter and refine their results.
In a post on the Official Google Blog, Marissa Mayer (Vice President of Search Products and User Experience) and Jack Menzel (Group Product Manager) explain how the tools work:
"Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week."
"In addition to forums, users can identify videos and reviews in the results and there are also various time options including 'past 24 hours' and 'past week', as well as the facility to set a custom date range. Other tools include the option to find related searches and a facility to represent them graphically in what Google terms the 'wonder wheel' of related search terms. The 'timeline' function shows how information on a particular topic has evolved over time, with the ability to drill down into this data by year and even by month."
Mayer and Menzel go on to say in their blog post, "We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future."
Google has also announced that its snippets – the short pieces of information returned with each result – are going to be enhanced, becoming what Google calls "rich snippets". The idea is that the extracts in search results will show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that users are currently used to. Rich snippets could include, for example, the average review score of a business such as a leisure attraction or restaurant.
Google needs help from websites to enhance these snippets, with Mayer and Menzel's post admitting:
"We can't provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google's search results stays high. If you are a webmaster and are interested in participating, visit the rich snippets help page to learn more."
Google also previewed its new 'Google Squared' tool at the searchology event. Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared does not simply find web pages about a specific topic but rather automatically gathers and organises facts from across the Internet.
Gosh! Media welcomes these 'slice and dice' functions and looks forward to seeing future tools designed for that giant information blender we call Google!
Read also
Google launches encrypted search engine
Tuesday 18 May 2010
Google adds brands to search results
Saturday 01 May 2010
Google highlights similar pages
Saturday 01 May 2010