Google Options

14.05.2009 Posted in Search

Google recently announced a set of new features it is adding to search, Google Options. This is a way to bring together certain search features that it already offered but were probably not commonly used, and a few new options it has unleashed upon the world.

Wonder Wheel

The Wonder Wheel is a visual way of seeing the ‘related searches’ feature that Google have had for a while. Google makes a judgement about what other searches are useful to people who have done your original search, and let you see how they relate.

This gives you some interesting searches you might not have thought of, but I imagine it will be most useful to advertisers doing keyword research.

Timeline

The timeline feature counts what Google interprets as news stories about your search term, and lets you see the trend of news. You can then burrow down into the results to pick a particular timeframe. This will likely be of most use to students, journalists and other people performing research. It lets you easily group together all the news about a specific event.

More Text

The More Text feature shows the same search results as normal, but opens up the text snippets underneath to allow a deeper view of the page contents.

I think this is the most useful feature for normal searches because it gives you a very good idea of what kind of page you are going to look at before you click through.

Images from the page

This feature picks some of the pictures found on the page and pops them into the search results so that you can get a feel for the flavour of the page. This is likely to be most useful if you’re searching for a particular product or piece of artwork or similar and you know there will be a lot of incorrect results when you search.

In my opinion the best feature of all of these isn’t any one feature at all, it’s the ability to combine several together. For instance if you are looking for a new DVD player, you can choose to view reviews only, from the last week, with more text. Or if you wanted to buy a print of your favourite artist you could choose to see images from the page and the wonder wheel to see if Google suggests other pieces that might interest you more.

I suspect that these will all be underused except by groups of people who happen to find them. How often do you use the ‘advanced search’ feature when searching on Google? Would you be likely to click on the ‘options’ button when you’ve already got a list of decent search results in front of you? The most interesting result will be if Google starts to integrate these into normal search results. If a search returns pages with lots of images, will Google choose ‘images from the page’ as default? If it returns a lot of news results, will we see a timeline appear at the top?

Only Google knows, but I think these are pretty useful options in the right circumstance, it will depend on how well Google judge when those circumstances arise.