Google boosts its Search Options to let users search results by past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news. The new search options, rolling out gradually in English on Oct. 1, can be accessed when a user does a search and clicks the blue bar under the Google logo. These features are important in helping Google maintain its massive 65 percent market share because Microsoft's Bing search engine has been adding on plenty of interesting features since its June launch.Google Oct. 1 expanded its Search Options with choices to ferret out results
by past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites,
visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news.
Google released Search Options on May 12, enabling
users to search and see Google results through more specific parameters.
The company's initial Search Options let users scan search results for the
past 24 hours, week or year. Users could also search through video and forum
results, see related searches, or search with a Wonder Wheel, which represents
a search term graphically as a wheel hub with "spokes" of related
topics.
The new search options, rolling out gradually in English by the end of the
day, can be accessed when a user does a search and clicks the blue bar under the Google logo. The search results
page will look like this.
Searches by past hour will show fresh results, though as Omgili CEO
Ran Geva showed, users can hack Google to search for results
within 1 minute or less. Searches by a specific date range could be really
powerful for users who know roughly when something happened, but can't place
the exact date.
Shopping-minded searchers can choose the "More shopping sites"
option to see additional commercial pages and see prices from those pages right
in the search results. Users can also select "Fewer shopping sites"
to filter out commercial sites.
Clicking "Visited pages" serves previous search results, while the
"Not yet visited" option lets users filter out sites they have
already stumbled upon. Users must be signed into their Google accounts and have
Web History enabled to use this option.
Finally, searches can now be filtered by books, blogs and news, joining the
videos and forums options from the initial Search Options release. Search
Engine Land's
Danny Sullivan has the best drill-down into results, and also offers a review of all Google's Search Options.
Reaction to and adoption of these options will vary; some features will be
extremely useful to some people and some will be completely useless to others.
The idea is that Google is covering as many bases in search as possible to
satisfy users across the board.
Google's Search Options update comes two weeks after Google released Fast Flip for publication searches and one week after it unveiled
the Sidewiki annotation service. the Earlier this week on Sept. 28, Google
began indexing its Hot Trends in search results.
These features are important in helping Google maintain its massive 65
percent market share. Microsoft's Bing search engine has been adding on plenty
of interesting features since its June launch.
Bing features include Bing Visual Search, Bing and Ping shared search, and indexed Twitter tweets. Still, the honeymoon period for Bing
may be over if these results from StatCounter are any indication.