Let’s look at Google news recently. And specific to search. From playing around with the core architecture of their engine, to including Google Jump To features to adding Hottest Trends, Google’s sure focusing on the one thing that made them famous – their search. Google summarizes all their current improvements here.
Google Blog recently reported some more changes. How many of you are familiar with the “Options” button when you search? Using it, you could modify timeline of your search results. And Google’s added a lot more utility to that options bar.
Look at the Options bar now.
Now you can specifically choose to limit your search to :
- Videos
- News
- Blogs
- Books (? – didn’t work for me – possibly the whole Google Books Copyright saga)
- Forums
- Reviews
And you can define the timescale (very useful)
- Recent Results
- Past hour
- Past 24 hrs
- Past week
- Past year
You can also define a specific date range.
We recently blogged about how you can tweak Google Research for Real-Time functionality.
You can choose between pages, visited and not-visited or all results. For this, you need to have enabled Web History and must not be paranoid about Google knowing too much.
Though Google’s supposed to have added Wonder Wheel to it’s features, I was unable to access it, again a possible India-restricted functionality.
The other improvements include, allowing you to focus on images. Since Google Image Searchdoesn’t really support too much text viewing, this is a welcome addition. With Each search result, Google allows you to view some text from the website. Bing opens more in a small pop-up window. The new feature allows you to view MORE text as a preview.
One awesome addition is the more shopping, less shopping sites feature. I really don’t like it when I am searching for product reviews and I get sites with measly two line reviews and price comparisons.
Of course, this review is very limited. SearchEngineLand has done an extensive review of Google’s search functionality included the required improvements. Check it out here.
Google’s definitely focusing a lot on it’s search features. What’s next? Personal Search Engines with search algorithms customized to your requirements? Fingers crossed.
