Saying that it wants to bring music fans “closer to your favorite artists,” Google has added a new Music Search OneBox to its search results. The new OneBox includes content from partner sites such as MySpace, Pandora, Lala and others, and lets searchers listen to song clips right from Google’s search results page. Searchers should begin to see the new OneBox in the next 24 hours.

Google has had a music OneBox before, but it disappeared some time ago, perhaps in preparation for the launch of this new Music Search 2.0, as we’re calling it. There’s also a deeper search function that only surfaces music-related content and still appears to be active — see this U2 search, for example.

According to today’s announcement, searches for the name of an artist, album, or song will show the new OneBox in Google’s main search results. If you search for an artist or album name, the OneBox will include a set of four songs that are chosen algorithmically by the partner music site, not by Google. Each song will be linked to an audio clip that will play in a Flash-based pop-up window provided by the partner site. In some cases, the partner may provide one full play of the song before defaulting to a 30-second preview.

Google’s music OneBox will include links to these music partner sites to discover more information about your music-based search, and sometimes the links will help you discover music that’s related to your search. Contrary to recent rumors, you won’t see any links to purchase the songs — at least for now. Google’s RJ Pittman told us today that, while some of their music partners have a commerce element, the focus of Google’s new music search is information, not selling digital songs. In fact, there’s no commercial arrangement at all, we’re told, between Google and the music partner sites included in this launch.

In some ways, this is a case of Google playing catch-up. Yahoo already offers a music shortcut with better features. From Yahoo’s search results, you can listen to up to 25 full-length songs per month (via Rhapsody, which is also partnering with Google now) and watch full-length music videos from Yahoo! Music.

But this shortcut is only shown on Yahoo searches for artist names, not for album or song names. Yahoo used to offer a lyric-specific shortcut, too, but that appears to have disappeared.

Speaking of song lyrics…

This is where Google’s announcement gets really interesting. Many of us don’t know the name of the song or artist, but we remember a line or two from a song and we use that as our search query. Google’s new music search will try to divine when searchers have put song lyrics into the search box and surface the correct song. The Google blog post shows a search for the phrase “static silhouette somehow”, which returns a OneBox about the song “Rome” by Phoenix.

How does Google know if your search query is a song lyric or not?

Pittman says the algorithm will look at things like the popularity of the search term; if Google starts to see a lot of searches for a popular song or its lyrics, it’ll show the OneBox. He also says it’ll take “at least a phrase” to initiate the lyric search, and the more words in your query, the more likely Google can correctly identify it as a lyric search. Google has partnered with Gracenote for this lyric matching effort.

What about when more than one song contains the same lyric?

In situations like this, Pittman says Google will only show one matching song — at least for now — and that the music partner’s algorithm will determine which song is the best likely match.

But there’s obviously a lot of room for error here, with so many songs sharing similar titles and similar lyrics, not to mention new artists covering old songs and sometimes changing a lyric or two in the process. “There are lots of songs with lots of overlap, and we’ll have to continue to improve,” Pittman says. Google’s announcement today even acknowledges the challenge of identifying search queries as song lyrics and returning the right song: “In some instances, we may not return links to the song you’re looking for.”

What’s missing?

Google has partnered with well known music sites such as MySpace, Pandora, iMeem, and others, to help searchers discover more about their favorite artists. But, as I suggested on the call today, there’s a lot of musical information that Google isn’t surfacing in its new OneBox — information from the many excellent fan-based web sites, for example, or from intelligent music media sites and blogs.

Sure, I’m biased. In 1995, I created @U2, which is the oldest independent site on the web about U2. We’ve been honored by Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and countless others over the years. As I said today, I’ll put our U2 lyrics, band biographies, etc., up against these music portal sites any day of the week.

Google’s announcement says “there’s a lot of music out there in the world,” but by limiting its results to a handful of partner sites, Google is limiting how much of that information will be found in its new Music Search OneBox.

See also: Live Blogging From The Google Discover Music Launch Event, by Danny Sullivan

You like it! You really like it! It being the Google Search Options feature that Google added to its search pages back in May, the company says. So as a reward, Google is adding options to filter out (or highlight) pages you’ve visited before, pages that Google’s found in the past hour and a toggle to show more or fewer “commercial” listings in its results.

My companion piece, Up Close With Google Search Options, does exactly as the headline says. It will take you through ALL the Search Options that Google’s offers in great depth, including the new ones. But for those who just want to hear about the latest features, here you go.

Visited / Not Yet Visited Filtering

Follow the arrow in the screenshot below:

See that new section? It shows up if you’re logged into Google and making use of its Web History feature (see Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History for more about this).

When you’re logged in, you can select the “Visited Pages” option for any search to see only the pages that you’ve been to already via past searches on Google and related to words you’re searching for. You can also do the opposite — filter out any pages you’ve already visited for a particular search, so you can focus on new areas to explore.

More / Fewer Shopping Sites

At the bottom of the Search Options panel, you’ll see the results section:

This area features two new options: “fewer shopping sites” and “more shopping sites.” These do exactly what’s described. Click on fewer, and if you search results had too many shopping results, they go away. Think of it as the Amazonator. Like shopping sites? Well have more of them! Just use the “more shopping sites” option.

Pages From The Past Hour

As the screenshot above shows, a new “past hour” option has joined the existing date filtering choices of past day, past week and past year — as well as the customer date range choice.

Not enough for you? Our Hidden Google Feature: Find What’s New In The Last Minute Or Second covers how to drill down even more. But also see our What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article to understand why what you think is real time might not be — unless you disagree with my view of what real time “content” is. In that case, leave a comment!

Find Books, News & Blogs

Up at the top of the Search Options column links that allow you to narrow results to these areas:

• Videos
• News (Added today)
• Books (Added last week)
• Reviews
• Forums
• Blogs (Being added today)

The ones in bold are new. Books was added quietly last week. News was added today. Blog is supposed to be added today, so keep watching, if you don’t see it.

Forum Sitelinks & Trends OneBox

Along with the new Search Options, Google’s also reminding people about the new forum listings that it added yesterday (see Google Rolls Out Sitelinks Display For Forums) and the Hot Trends OneBox unit that’s been added (see Take That, Twitter: Google Hot Trends Integrated Into Google Search).

And will there be more to come? You betcha, says Google.

“Usage [of search options] has been strong and increasing more and more,” said Nundu Janakiram, an associate product manager at Google, about the changes. “The steady increase in using the tool tells us we should try to add new and interesting features into the panel.”

What percentage of people use the panel? Revealing that data would cause the Earth’s rotation to stop, or the universe to collapse into a black hole, or — yeah, Google’s absurdly paranoid and won’t say. But I’m hoping they’ll loosen up in the near future. But they would say that among the options, the date and time filtering ones are the most popular.

Hey, that Up Close With Google Search Options article that I mentioned? Really consider reading it. It covers the things above in way more depth.

Twitter and real time search continues to attract buzz, and Google’s reacting by positioning its “Hot Trends” information in a place where more people will see it, within Google’s regular search results.

Starting around 3:45 Pacific Time today, those searching on topics that are spiking or “hot” in popularity should see a new Hot Trends OneBox near the bottom of the search results page and just above the related search area, similar to below:

Here’s another example:

“The idea behind the [Hot Trends] OneBox is to not only provide you with search results as you’d want but also extra meta data on how popular the search is and whether it has peaked in interest, plus the number of sites that are creating chatter and buzz about this particular topic or person, to give a relative hotness rating as well” said RJ Pittman, director of product management for consumer search properties at Google.

From the OneBox, people can then access more information about the topic using the Google Hot Trends service, which was launched in May 2007. (Google Trends itself, the “parent” to Hot Trends, launched in May 2006 and allows people to see how popular many search terms are over time, regardless of how “hot” they are). The boxes show on Google in the United States and Japan.

Hot Trends shows what Google considers to be hottest searches on an hourly basis, searches that many people are suddenly doing. For example, Melissa Gilbert was at the top of the Hot Trends list when I looked earlier today:

Clicking on her name, I can drill in and discover news, blog posts and web results about her. Looking at the news articles in particular, it seems she’s a hot topic today due to her being in a new stage version of Little House On The Prairie:

Why bring Hot Trends into regular Google search results? Pittman said it’s due to the “growth and popularity of real time information.” Places like Twitter allow people to tweet or microblog information within seconds, causing others to turn to them to discover the latest trend in news and current events.

Google realized it has a great source of microblogged content itself, what people put into the Google search box (which recently got bigger).

“Trends is all based on a different kind of tweet. Instead of the 140 character tweet, it’s the 20 to 25 character tweet, the keyword search. And those come in much faster than tweets do. In our view, that’s the highest fidelity information for trending topics,” Pittman said.

What would really make Hot Trends more compelling to me is if there were real time information listed along with the news, blog posts and web page articles shown (see my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article to better understand what I mean by real time content). Will a “Twitter Results” or “Real Time Results” column be coming? “Not at this time,” said Pittman.

To me, that means Twitter (and to a growing degree, Facebook) will remain a draw for searches where you are seeking immediate confirmation of an event that hasn’t yet gotten news coverage (”Was that an earthquake? “Is the cable out in my area?”).

As part of the new launch, another change has been to reduce the number of Hot Trend topics shown on the Hot Trends home page from 100 to 40. One reason is to help reduce the amount of spam that has sprung up around Hot Trends, misleading or low-content blog posts and web pages created around trending terms in hopes of getting traffic.

“Potentially could be a nice side benefit [spam reduction]. Whenever Google does something like putting together something useful for our users like Trends, these often become targets. We’ve done our best efforts to combat the spam and keep the quality of the list as accurate as possible,” Pittman said.

The main reason for the reduction, however, is to keep those new to Hot Trends from being overwhelmed. Currently, Hot Trends are viewed by people who deliberately seek that type of deep dive into the information. Now, more “regular” searchers may stumble into the area, so Google doesn’t want to “overload” them.

“It’s not that there isn’t value in having a bigger a list, but the bigger the list, the more to wade through,” Pittman said. “I’m not taking that for granted that this is comfortable knowledge for people on Google [what Hot Trends are]. So we’re starting with square one here.”

While the Hot Trends site will only show the top 40 trends for a given hour, the full top 100 list will continue to be used to trigger when a Hot Trends OneBox may show in regular Google search results.

Bing also has a Hot Trends-like service, xRank, launched two years ago this month. But unlike Google’s new Hot Trends OneBox, xRank results remain largely hidden from regular searchers. For example, tebow was the top “mover” in xRank earlier today:

The only way for a regular searcher on Bing to know to explore Tebow’s xRankiness further is if they notice the “xRank” option in the left-hand column, understand what that means, and click on it:

As for Google Hot Trends — watch this space for more, says Google.

“Trends is becoming more relevant than ever. I think this is just the beginning of our efforts in this area,” said Pittman.

For more about Google Trends, see the Google Trends section of our Search Engine Land members library. Here’s also some selected articles:

• Google Meme: Hot Trends Added To Google Trends for more on how it works)
• Google Trends Now Updated Hourly

See also Techmeme for related discussion.

Google’s “normal” listings show the title of a web page, a description of it (also called a “snippet”) and the web page’s URL. However, Google also has other listings that appear within search results that are designed to give access to some of its specialized search tools (such as news search), to allow more information to be shown than a standard answer provides or to show answers directly within the search page. Here’s a short overview to these alternatives.

OneBox Results

OneBox results are when Google shows information within a special unit, often with images associated with them. OneBox unit often appears to highlight news, shopping, image and other results that are blended into regular listings using Universal Search (see Google Universal Search for more about this)

In the example below, you can see three different OneBox units all mixed among regular results:

OneBox, by the way, gets its name from the idea that Google searchers should be able to use one single search box to access information from the various Google specialized search engines that exist.

Local OneBox Results — The “10-Pack”

For local results, Google does a special OneBox display that has a map on the left side of the OneBox and 10 local listings to the right. Here’s an example:

Those who track local search closely call this the “10-Pack” or “Ten Pack” display, because of the 10 local listings that are packed into such a small area.

Plus Box

Google “Plus Box” results are where Google shows a search listing with a little + symbol nearby that when selected “expands” the listing to show more information. For example, in the search on “dell” below, you can see a line that says “+ Show stock quote for DELL” like this:

Clicking on the + symbol displays a stock price chart and further information, like this:

Direct Answers

For some popular queries, Google tries to show an exact answer to what you’re looking for right at the top of the search pages. For example, here’s a search on weather in Newport Beach:

See how the weather report is shown directly in the results? That’s a direct answer, and Google does this for everything from sports scores to flight tracking. Here’s a list from Google of just some examples of direct answers you can try.

For more about the features shown above, see the Google: OneBox, Plus Box & Direct Answers section of the Search Engine Land Library. Also see the Google: Search Customization and Google: User Interface sections for other ways Google customizes its search results.

Google launched Google Health back in February 2008. Today, Google is integrating Google Health content into the search results via the classic OneBox section of the page. You should be able to see the Google Health OneBox for medical related searches, such as for [asthma] or [diabetes].

Here is a screen capture of the OneBox result for Asthma:

As you can see, Google provides a quick definition of the condition and then gives you a link to either Google Health, Mayo Clinic, Medline Plus or WebMD. Note, not all of these links will be available for all health-related queries.

I asked Roni Zeiger, the product manager for Google Health, about monetization of Google Health. He told me it is about getting the answer as quickly as possible to the searcher. They have no current plans or even future plans to add ads to the Google Health property.

Not do be outdone by Live Search adding sports scores, both Yahoo and Google added some of their own. Keep in mind, both Google and Yahoo have had sports scores in the search results, but both have made additions to theirs.

Yahoo has added a way to search for your favorite sports team. For example, a search on Chicago Bulls returns this Yahoo Shortcut:

Google has added Tennis stats and scores, according to Google Operating System. For example, a search on Federer returns this one box:

During the Wolfram Alpha demonstration today, the Google Blog announced the launch of their own structured data search feature that allows you to find and compare public data.

Searches such as [unemployment rate new york] will now bring up a quick answer that looks like this:

Clicking on the result will take you to a more detailed graph with ways to plot other data on this charge. Below is me plotting Rockland County, New York, compared to New York State and also adding California:

Google promises to add public data for answers on prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires amongst others. Currently this data is coming from produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division, but Google does hope to bring in more public data sources.

Why did Google announce this during the Wolfram Alpha Demo? Wolfram Alpha seems to be all about collecting these data sources and making it easy for people to search information on these types of data sources, complete with charts. The timing suggest Google was hoping to spoil what some see as a weakness it might have compared to Wolfram Alpha. I expect us to do more detailed piece on Wolfram|Alpha soon, so stay tuned.

Gary Price has also posted on the news and Google also posted a quick video demonstration:

Postscript: See Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”, our review of the service and which also covers Google saying the timing of its structured data launch was entirely coincidental.

Ever searched for yourself on Google and come away dissatisfied, especially if someone else you share a name with seems to dominate the results? Ever looked for someone else and been disappointed that you couldn’t find the person you wanted? Google’s new “Profile Results” launching today aim to correct both problems.

Since the end of 2007, Google has allowed people to create Google Profile pages for use with certain Google services. For example, if you created content in Google Maps, your Google Profile let you share who you were with others using that service. The same profile also served to identify you when using the completely different Google Reader service.

Now Google Profiles are going beyond Google’s own services. They’re being promoted as a way for people to tell the world who they are and, to some degree, being offered as a way for people to claim their identity in Google’s main search results.

“People have no control over how they appear when other people search for them on Google. That’s a big issue we’ve heard,” said Joe Kraus, a director of product management at Google. “The new results are to better control what people see and improve the ability for people to fine what they’re looking for.”

In the new system, a new “Profile results” section will appear at the bottom of a Google search page, when it finds a strong match in response to a name-based search. Up to four profiles will be shown:

You can also search directly for profiles here.

Building Your Profile Page

The profiles all come from Google Profile pages, which means in order for a chance to appear, you’ve got to have a page. That’s fairly easy. There’s no charge to have a page, and you needn’t use any particular Google services, either. Just sign-up here. You can also search for “me” on Google, and if you’re signed-in, you’ll see an option promoting how to make your own profile.

After signing-up, you can provide a variety of information about yourself, including:

• Your picture
• Your first and/or last name
• Nickname
• Where you grew up
• Where you live
• Where you work
• Schools you’ve attended
• A biography
• Links to web sites you wish to list
• Pictures from your Picasa, Flickr or other online photo albums
• Contact information, which can be shared selectively with people

Not all of these options were offered when Profile pages were first launched. The pages have gained more features over time, and the new additions have been pretty poorly communicated, I’d say. If you’re like me, you’ve probably had a fairly bare display.

The new system will cause many people to reexamine their profiles, as they hope to appear in Google’s main results. But with only four spaces, some names will be competitive. Which ones will show? Those that Google feels are “comprehensive enough,” Kraus said.

Does that mean you need to fill out all the fields, including what your “superpower” is? No. Kraus said there are no hard-and-fast rules, especially since the system’s ranking criteria are likely to change over time. But for now, those who at least fill out the form with their first and last name (this is the basic requirement), along with a few links to content, will probably increase the odds of appearing.

Profile Page Options: From Job Title To Links

As an example of what you can do, here’s my profile, which until yesterday had only consisted of my photo, my name and a few links. I’ve pimped it up since then:

Below, you can see how information in my profile’s “What I do” box gets combined with the “Current Company” box to form a job title below my name. Under that, the “Where I live now” box is used to show my location. All this is done using the Edit Profile option:

Whatever you put in these boxes will appear. There’s no attempt to verify that you really do have a job title that you claim to hold or that you work for a particular company. However, there is an option for others to report profiles that they feel are inappropriate.

As for my biography, I used the “Short bio” box to enter what I wanted to appear. This box even allows you to add links to your bio:

For those wondering, so far, these appear to be straight links that do pass PageRank. The nofollow attribute is not used, nor do I see other blocking, so potentially anyone can use their Google profile for link building efforts. I suspect that nofollow will come down the line.

Speaking of links, you’ll notice that in the upper right-hand corner of my profile are several links I’ve listed. These are added using the Links area of your edit profile page:

You can add any links you like. However, Google will also suggest some for you. Sometimes it can tell from information you’ve entered what links might be related to you, using the Google Social Graph. Or enter your FriendFeed link, and it will suggest other services you’ve told FriendFeed about.

As mentioned, you can also add a photo strip to your profile, pulling in pictures from public albums on Google’s Picasa, Yahoo’s Flickr or any URL that provides a photo feed. Just use the Photos tab to do this.

Verified Names & Emails

Now let’s look at two special things showing on my profile, that I have a “Verified name” and a “Verified email,” as shown below:

Don’t go looking on your profile page for the option on how to verify your name. It’s not there. Instead, to have a verified name, you need to enroll in the Google Knol service and verify your name there (see Google Knol – Google’s Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages). If you’ve done that, you get a verified name. If not, you don’t.

It’s crazy, but it’s also a symptom of how piecemeal Google’s entire profile system feels to have developed over the past year. It’s as if Google drove its social networking car out onto the racetrack back in 2007 to chase after Facebook but kept adding parts to it during the race, without stopping.

Should you get a verified name? Right now, it doesn’t influence whether your profile will rank better in profile results. But if you’re trying to convince people to trust that the page is really controlled by you, it probably makes sense.

Then there’s the verified email. The idea here is that you’ve shown Google that you can send email from a given domain. For example, if you claimed to work for Microsoft, the system allows you to prove that you’ve received email from an address at microsoft.com. Or as the help page says:

When people who know you visit your profile and see, for example, your school’s domain name, they’ll be able to know that it’s the real you on your profile.

As for those who only have email from a free service, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or even Google’s own Gmail, they’re out of luck. These services aren’t seen as trustworthy enough to allow for verification.

While I understand that concern, I also find it odd. If many people start having verified email addresses, then it suggests those who don’t have profiles with verified emails are somehow less trustworthy. And since the entire Profile results system is designed in part to help those with less “net presence,” as Kraus called it, to have a shot of appearing in Google’s results, it’s unfortunate they get discriminated in this way.

Of course, as with verified names, verified email addresses don’t mean you’ll rank better. Those unverified folks have just as good of chance of coming up as the verified people. It just from a perception standpoint, they might have profiles that seem less trustworthy.

Vanity URLs For Profiles

Your profile is a web page, and that means it has its own URL. By default, your URL will be a long string of numbers. For example, my profile is here:

http://www.google.com/profiles/113217924531763968801

Of course, last week there was a great flurry when it was noted that Google started allowing profiles to have “vanity URLs.” Want a URL that uses your own name? You can have it.

Sort of.

It turns out that vanity URL must be the same as your Gmail address. In other words, whatever your address is on Gmail, that’s going to be your address in your vanity URL. If my Gmail address began emperorzorg, then I’d have a vanity URL that looked like this:

google.com/profiles/emperorzorg

Oh joy. If you have a Gmail account, and you claim your vanity URL, then you expose you email address to the world. Google explicitly warns you that this can happen, but it’s still pretty sucky. Why not operate the way that Google’s YouTube does or Yahoo’s Flickr, where you can have a username that is different than your email address?

Kraus said that Google is trying to have a unified namespace, where everyone has one name with Google and things are kept as simple as possible. That means using your Gmail name as your profile’s URL.

But wait! Life certainly isn’t so simple at Google. I actually have at least two active Google accounts, one of which isn’t linked to Gmail at all. I think I got that one by signing up for AdWords or some other service before Gmail existed. I’m also far from the only person in this situation, given I’ve seen ample Google help pages over time on how to transfer a particular service between different Google accounts.

And that non-Gmail account? The good news is that I can use that to get a vanity URL of my choosing. That’s right. Any Google Account not linked with Gmail can set the URL to whatever name they want, assuming that name is free.

Of course, this means that if you have an existing account, you’d have to find a way to move some of your services over to the new one (not always easy or even possible). You might also find the name you want isn’t free. And behind the scenes, if you ever do get a Gmail account? Whatever name you picked will be your Gmail address, Kraus said.

Clearly I’m grumpy over all this. I wish Google had let people pick whatever names they wanted for their URLs and kept it separate from Gmail addresses. But that’s how things are.

Choosing What To Reveal

Unlike with Facebook, there’s no granular control over what you share with the world on your profile. If you list where you grew up, everyone will see that rather than you selectively deciding to share it with just friends or family. It’s all or nothing. So don’t put anything on your page that you’re not comfortable sharing — which is easy, since nothing other than your first and last name is required to show up in search results.

An exception to sharing relates to Contact Info. This is an area where you can list your email addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, IM addresses and your birthday. You can selectively decide which of your friends to share this information with, and you can create groups of friends.

How’s all this play out in the Google-Facebook saga? With most of Facebook’s searches being people-oriented, is this Google trying to take on Facebook in the people search space?

“We already are a people search engine, in that people search for people all the time on Google, so we’re trying to improve it,” Kraus said.

True enough. And the change should be welcomed by many. I’ve regularly gotten email from people wondering how they could show up better for their names, especially in cases where there’s unflattering information about them. Yahoo was recently sued in one case. Personal reputation management is an entirely different issue — but even in those cases, there’s a core of the person wanting to be able to speak for themselves in the search results. The Google Profile results offer a new opportunity for this to happen.

For more, see related discussion on Techmeme.

About two years ago, Greg Sterling wrote a piece on Searching for Earthquakes. Since then, I believe Ask.com was the only search engine providing a “smart answer” for earthquake data. Ask.com continues to offer the smart answer, but recently, Google added their own.

Google Operating System reports Google has added an Earthquake OneBox result for a search on earthquake. Here is a picture:

The data Google uses for this OneBox is from U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program.

Postscript: A day or so after, Google posted information about this new OneBox and titled their post Shaking up earthquake searches.

Mike Blumenthal reports seeing Google test a new type of map within the search results listings. He said he is only able to trigger this map to show using Firefox with the Google Toolbar installed. So his theory is that Google is testing some geolocation technology in the Firefox toolbar. I personally cannot reproduce it, but I trust Mike is seeing this. Here is a screen capture of one such result:

Others reportedly have seen this type of map embedded within specific listings a month or so ago. It would make sense for Google to show maps in some cases, when you are looking up a specific company and the address may be relevant to the searcher.

Google frequently tests changing how maps are displayed in the search results, and with new geolocation capabilities being built into browsers, I would not be surprised to see more enhancements and experiments in 2009.