Google Adds New “Search Options” Tool

Google revealed a bunch of new search features and products at the second Searchology event last week, some of which have already been implemented and are available to anyone using the search engine while some were just previewed and will be available on Google Labs.

Marrissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, and Jack Menzel, group product manager, commented on the new features on the Google blog. “We have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that’s on the web and connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it,” they said.

The new feature set is called Search Options and it offers an array of tools designed to help users better manage their searches. For example, Google can now filter your results to only show the ones from forums and discussion boards, letting you know what others have to say on the subject. Another filter is for just video results, a somewhat redundant feature as Google already has a dedicated video search and also integrates video results in its Universal Search, launched at the first Searchology event, but it may nonetheless prove useful. One important feature the company introduces is the ability to sort your searches by date and also get results from only a specific time frame. And then there’s “rich snippets,” which will provide additional and more specific information such as ratings.

A tool that was only previewed at the event is Google Squared, which won't return webpages but instead present the user with facts gathered from the Internet. This is slightly similar to the recently launched Wolfram Alpha search engine, the difference lying in the way data is gathered and presented. Google is trying to structure the data already available on the web while Wolfram will store massive amounts of it in its internal data base. This tool will be available later on Google Labs.