Searchology: The Search For The Golden Egg..

Image by Mykl Roventine via Flickr

According to Google the 21st Century will be about understanding people, although I'm sure there are certain people that we will never understand.

Google’s annual Searchology event took place today at its Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California. At the event Google announced several new products: Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets and a new Android application called Sky Map. Scott Huffman, Director of Engineering also spoke about Mobile Search stating that it needs to be 'fast, relevant, comprehensive and fresh' which is what we should expect from your mobile device.

Google acknowledges the hard unsolved problems in search and in doing so announced their Real-Time intentions -

- Finding the most recent information
- Expressing that you want just one type of result
- Assessing which results are best
- Knowing what you’re looking for
- Expressing your searches in keywords

In an attempt to address the unsolved problems they announced additional filters; including certain media, such as videos, or by certain content types, such as forum discussions or reviews.

I'm going to focus on the new search tool called "search options," which provide the ability to search by relevance and not just by date.

"Search options is a further way to give users the power to customise the way

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

they use Google," said Juergen Galler, director of product management at Google. "We’re always thinking about what we can do to improve the search experience, and we think this launch is a good step to help users get quickly and easily to precisely the kind of information they seek." [Source]

We are now able to filter our query to provide a more accurate result, selecting "search options" we are presented with a left hand panel with several filters. The filters provide the added ability to display video entries, entries from discussion forums and entries with reviews.

Anytime Search adds relevance by displaying results determined by; recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year although I would like to see introduced the ability to add a date range to fine tune results. As well as displaying the results in a standard view, we can also view related searches, a "wonder wheel" (a quick visual way to explore a topic) view, or a timeline view.

Real Time has become the holy grail of search, Tweetmeme and OneRiot announced their efforts today, Twitter Search and Friendfeed's extensive filters are also part of the equation but who will emerge as the Golden Goose?

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