Fresh from the second Searchology Event, Google announced three new enhancements to its Search Product – Search Options, Search Results Snippets, and Google Squared. The first two features are definitely useful especially for users who are too lazy to formulate specific search strategies to filter their search. While the third feature is rather vague as to what it really is at this time.Google Search Options
This new feature consists of categorized filtering options for determining how you’d like your current SERPs be displayed. It generates different views of the SERPs based on certain criteria.
The available search options include
- viewing search results from Forum discussions, online video sites, or product review sites, time-bound search results that can be filtered by the most recent, past 24 hours, past week or past year,
- timeline view which displays a historical graph with corresponding search results arranged by timeline,
- the wonder wheel view which displays a rather odd graph and the search results listed on the right side of the SERP,
- the usual related searches views but this time the related searches link is displayed on top of the SERPs,
- Image search view highlighting search results with accompanying images
- More text views which is simply the previous minus the images
Search Results “Rich Snippets”
This is a useful search results feature but would depend on the cooperation of site owners and developer to be successful. Rich snippets are more particularly useful for search results containing product and service reviews. It shows snippets of the reviews without clicking on the link first. These feature however relies on microformats and RDFa standards to mark up site HTML which can be easily adopted by web publishers in order for Google to organize search results into structured data. More information about the rich snippets can be found at the rich snippets help page .
Google Squared
The last new feature announced by Google is rather vague and confusing as to what it really is. Google describe it as:
Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We’ll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.
So, I guess we have to stay tune for more Google announcements regarding this search feature or product.
