Google moved closer Tuesday to its highly ambitious goal of organizing the world’s information as it announced new options for its popular search engine.
Search options, according to a posting on The Official Google Blog, “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.” The blog announcement noted that the options will help users solve a basic problem in searching — what question should I be asking?
‘Show Options’ Link
“Show options” is a link on search-result pages, offering such filters as videos, forums, and reviews. Clicking on reviews after searching for a product name brings up all the results that Google thinks are reviews, and reviews can be filtered by time.
One example given by Google was that of a user who wanted to see recent forum discussions about a specific product. With search options, filters can be applied to product-name search results, such as removing anything but forum sites and setting the time window to only include results from the past week.
A new time line option lets a user group results by when they appeared and drill down to specific points in time. For instance, if a student is writing a paper about green energy, she can see how the results have evolved over time.
A “wonder wheel” option graphically groups results in a wheel formation, with the searched topic in the center and linked, related subjects on the spokes. Clicking on a related topic brings up its own wonder wheel, with its own related topics.
‘Google Squared’
The results themselves will also get richer. Google calls each set of information in each result a “snippet,” and they will now become “richer snippets.”
A result for a restaurant, for instance, will show an average review score, the price range, and…