New Google Search Features

Today Google rolled out some very exciting new search features. Google's continual innovation provides evidence of the company's commitment to the Google 'search experience' and re-affirms their dominance in the market, particularly within Australia.

I had a play with some of their new features this afternoon, and I immediately found them extremely useful, and quite exciting, while at the same time being unobtrusive. One click access to features such as timeline, reviews and related searches allows information to be found even faster. My motto is 'do more in less time', so this is something I like very much!

The Google brand is synonymous with search. The internet and being found has never been more important for Australian businesses. I regularly hear from our clients how much of an impact the Google Marketing Campaigns we manage, have on businesses exposure, enquires, sales and overall business profitability. Talk to a friendly Google Qualified Professional today. Find out for yourself.

Google's video release:

You can read more details on the Google blog post here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-other-updates.html

Today we are hosting our second Searchology event, to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features. Our first Searchology was two years ago, when we were excited to launch Universal Search, a feature that blended results of different types (web pages, images, videos, books, etc.) on the results page. Since then Universal Search has grown quite a bit, adding new types of results, expanding to new countries, and triggering on ten times as many queries as it did when we launched it.

But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, 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 quickly 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.

Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask?

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. Just last week, at our Shareholders' Meeting, I had a woman ask me why she couldn't organize her results by time, with the most recent information appearing first. "Come back Tuesday," I wanted to say!

The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways...