Google Searchology event: more search options

Wed 13 May 2009 09:02, Bas van den Beld

Every year Google organizes the Searchology event. On that event Google informs its partners and customers on the progress they made and shows them some new features.

Yesterday Marissa Mayer announced three new features which will should improve the search experiences in Google. We are getting Search Options, rich snippets, Google Squared and Android gets Google Sky Map.

Search Options
First of all Search Options. Search Options "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."

What it is, is that you get the possibility to filter the results. With different views you can select the topics you're interested in. And not only that, you can also filter them in time. All results from last week for example.
This will make the search experience definitly better. Especcially when you're researching this will definitly help narrowing down your results.

Rich Snippets
With a simple tweet Matt Cutts (he was live twittering the event) announced the rich snippets on Tuesday-afternoon.

Some of the existing snippets will become richer. The rich snippets will give more information than the previewed text we normally get. Rich snippets could include things like average review scores, number of reviews and price ranges.

Google is counting on publishers to help them get the rich snippets. They will have to use microformats or RDFa standards in their HTML. Google even set up a special help page for the rich snippets.

Google Squared
Third Google Squared. It looks like Google has looked at Wolfram Alpha when developing this new feature, though it's not the same. It automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet and creates tables of numerical data. The service isn't live yet, but will be later on this month in Google labs.

Google Sky Map
Like to look at the stars? Android will now help you a little to find out which star is located where. It uses GPS to locate where you are and where you are pointing your phone to. Based on that information Sky Map shows you a map of the brightest stars, constellations and planets in that part of the sky.

<All gloves off: Bidding on Trade...

Is Google playing with YouTube?>

Comments (1)

- Dennis Sievers
- [website]
Some interesting features. I read that Google is implementing these features to give users more information about results, so they can better decide which result suites their needs. On one hand, Google will deliver less, but higher quality traffic to websites; on the other hand, searchers will spend more time over at Googles domain, which gives Google the possibility to gain more revenue from other sources. Looks like a win-win situation for both parties.

Wed 13 May 2009, 09:17

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