Google adds New Search Results Filter

Some of us who do ‘Advanced Search’ on Google have at times wished to have those options on the main search page. For readers who are not aware of ‘Advanced Search’, it is a convenient way to narrow down your search using a wide range of options like language, file types, freshness of content, locality and even the location of the search term on a webpage.

Preferences, which lies just below ‘Advanced Search’ is a good way to save some of the options for your login.

New Search Results Filter

While ‘Advanced Search’ lets you specify the search criteria before you get the results, the new Search Results filter added by Google can be used to filter the search results after they have been displayed.

You can find the ‘Show Options‘ menu on top of the search results as in the screenshot below.

Clicking on this menu brings up a sidepanel with a list of available options. You can easily find fresh content from the search results by choosing a date and time range in the ‘Any time’ section of the ‘Show Options’ menu.

Google has introduced a ‘hub and spoke’ representation of search results with the ‘Wonder Wheel’.

Another new option previously unavailable is ‘Forums’ which gives results only from groups and communities and also gives a hint of the activity of the forum showing the number of posts and authors on the forum.

Upcoming Advanced Search Features

Google Squared, a soon to be released product of Google Labs will present information in a tabular form. It culls the data from search results , organizes it in the form of rows and columns and sends the table to a spreadsheet. For e.g., search for ‘price’ and ‘capacity’ on a washing machine would generate a matrix with the items filled in and with links back to the Web pages from which it drew the content.

Rich snippets is another feature which according to Google will be rolling out gradually in the coming days. It enhances the search results by displaying the information from the web page within a box. You can even see the ratings of a product or review in the search results itself with this feature. This feature is not applicable to all web pages, but only to those publishers with whom Google has a partnership.