Mountain View, California — In an attempt to outdo the shortly planned launch of the Wolfram Alpha search engine, Google on Tuesday demonstrated a new set of features dubbed “Search Options,” aimed at providing improved search results that it believes will make the “Internet Smarter.” The new offerings include Google Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets, and an astrology-related Android app.
The announcement Tuesday at the Searchology press conference in Mountain View, Calif., unveiled a variety of tools that allow people to search and visualize results in different ways.
The web giant rolled out three new enhancements to its search engine that supports people who have become more sophisticated in the way they search the Web. The collection of improvements reportedly allows users to generate different views by filtering results and adding new types of data to the search results themselves. Many of the applications are now available, or will launch later this month.
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, known as Google Search Options, Google Squared, and Rich Snippets. Search Options will be rolling out gradually on 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.
“For example, say you are searching for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently,” Google explained in a blog post. “That is not an easy query to formulate, but with search options you can search for the product’s name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.”
The search options panel also provides users with the ability to view their results in new ways and includes images as well as text.
“We think of the search options dialog box as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more advanced and useful features in the future,” added Google.
The announcements “center 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, combining regular search results with images, video, and news results.
The tools are designed to solve some of the most difficult tasks on the Web, such as identifying recent information or ascertaining the exact Web pages that will satisfy the search — key themes that appeared from feedback about Universal Search and SearchWiki, according to Mayer.
Built upon Universal Search, Mayer and Nundu Janakiram, an associate product manager, displayed how Search Options that enable users looking for information on the Hubble Telescope, for example, to filter out their results with a “Show Options” link at the very top of the search results page. Choosing that link pops-up a new page with a list of options on the side, somewhat akin to the current Google News user interface.
In general, once you perform a normal Web search, you can view in detail with different genres, including elements of time, visualization tools, recently added, blogs, or images, combining a variety of Google search products into one.
Choosing “images from the page,” meanwhile, will display pictures pulled from the site alongside search results.
In addition to unveiling search options, the company also introduced a new “snippet feature” designed to display useful information extracted from web pages. For example, rich snippets resulting from restaurant review searches would likely include average review scores, the number of reviews along with menu prices.
Google Squared is the newest addition available on Google Labs later this month, would allow people to build something similar to a spreadsheet. Users can refine the unstructured data collected 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.
“Not only are we building a square metrics of values — the Google Squared network Google’s our Google search results for all the different values that can populate a table like this,” Mayer says. “You can visualize the automated way computers and algorithms found all the meaningful facts around names, pictures, descriptions, weights and heights around these dogs.”
Beginning today, Google will start supporting open HTML standards not just for formatting, but for the meaning as well. Those who wish to participate in Rich Snippets can add quick tags to give Google a better understanding of what on their pages, Mayer said.
Rich Snippets is an association between Google and certain publishers, including CNET, to display information from Web pages within the box that encompasses a search result.
The goal to improve search results prompted Google to adopt RDFs and Microformats markups, but it will require Webmasters to add the tags. It should improve search results by giving engines more information to return queries. For example, the information served up on a mobile phone may render differently if the search engine recognizes the data as a review.
The feature is pretty similar to Yahoo’s SearchMonkey, which the Google rival unveiled a year ago. SearchMonkey empowers 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.
Finally, Google introduced the Android Sky Map application that searches the heavens for stars and constellations. It relies on GPS to create a star map that pinpoints the user’s position and location on Earth. Moving the phone, the map adjusts the view of the universe. The app transforms the device into map overlay for the sky. Searching for Mayer’s astrological sign Gemini provides a demonstration of search.
“Not only does it know where on the planet [your phone] is, it also knows which direction you are holding the phone,” said creator John Taylor.