Google enhances search with new filters
Published: 13 May 2009 09:55 BST
Google introduced three new enhancements known as Google Search Options, Google Squared and Rich Snippets to its search engine on Tuesday, giving searchers new ways to filter results and adding new types of data to the search results themselves.
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and experience, led a parade of the company's product managers on stage at Searchology 2009 to demonstrate the new features. Search Options will be rolling out gradually starting from Tuesday, giving searchers ways to filter their results based on factors like timeliness, result type such as image or videos or a desire to see search results in visual form.
The announcements "centre around how can you find more and what can you do with it", Mayer said. Google last held a Searchology event in 2007, when it introduced Universal Search, blending regular search results with images, video and news results.
Building on Universal Search, Mayer and Nundu Janakiram, an associate product manager, showed how Search Options allows users searching for information on the Hubble Telescope, for example, to filter their results with a 'Show Options' link at the very top of the search results page. Clicking on that link brings up a new page with a list of options on the side, somewhat akin to the current Google News user interface.
By opting for the most recent information on the space telescope, the subject of a current NASA mission, users will be given a mix of news and blog results. If they prefer, they can click a filter that will sort those stories with images pulled from those stories.
Other options include new ways to visualise search results, such as the News Timeline introduced last month, as well as something called Wonder Wheel that visually represents data as rays of a star spreading out from the centre of a search result.
Google Squared is the newest addition to Google Labs. This project allows searchers to create a spreadsheet based on web results. Users can filter the data accessed through the Google Squared search, request additional categories to create a custom spreadsheet with the results that matter the most to them, and even fact-check the results by accessing the source of the data as well as alternate sources.
The other enhancement discussed on Tuesday is called Rich Snippets, which is a partnership between Google and certain publishers to display information from web pages within the box that encompasses a search result. Google is backing open standards called RDFa markup and Microformats markup that allow web publishers to highlight aspects of their web pages to show in the search results.
An example used in the presentation was from ZDNet UK's sister site CNET.com and displayed the number of stars
assigned by a CNET reviewer to a sat-nav device in the search results for a
particular product.
The feature is closely related to Yahoo's SearchMonkey, which the Google rival released a year ago. SearchMonkey allows outside developers to create their own SearchMonkey extensions to spotlight content, but to try to encourage use by more publishers, Yahoo has been working to make SearchMonkey easier to use.
Credit: Google adds new filters, visualized results from CNET News
Did you find this article useful?
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
