Google Unveils New Search Features

New enhancement and filtering functions added to results.

By Bill Mickey
Wednesday, May 13, 2009

It's been two years since Google's first Searchology, a breifing event to update users and partners on new features. In the meantime, the search landscape has changed dramatically. Addressing those changes, Google announced Tuesday at its second Searchology new functions that allow users to further hone and enhance results.

Search Options can be turned on after a search is performed to give the user a range of options to further refine, filter and organize the results. A product review search, for example, can be filtered by actual reviews, discussion forums and then by results within a certain timeframe—by last 24 hours, week or year. Users can also switch between types of content, filtering by videos or forums, for example.

Google has also enhanced the information contained in the results themselves, called "snippets." The new, richer snippets offer more information than the standard preview text. Going back to the review example, users will now see an average review score, number of reviews and price ranges.

The new snippet enhancements offer a new opportunity for content publishers to make sure their results information is as robust as possible. "We can't provide these snippets on our own," said Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience, and Jack Menzel, group product manager, in a blog post yesterday. "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."

Available later in the month on Google Labs will be Google Squared, a feature that doesn't locate and present Web page results, but "automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet."

A Reuters report described Google Squared as a feature that searches the Web for a topic and presents facts in a spreadsheet format.