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.

Now that Google Search Options has added new features, I thought it was a good time to revisit how everything works — and in some cases, doesn’t work. Let’s get up close and personal with all the filtering options!

By the way, this is a long article. If you want a digest of what’s new today, then see the much shorter companion piece, Google Adds Visited Pages, Past Hour & Fewer Shopping Sites Filtering.

Using Search Options

The Search Options panel is available after you do a search. Look near the top left-hand side of the search page, just below the search box, and you’ll see a “+ Show Options” link:

After you do this, a series of options will appear to the left of your search results:

Selecting any of these will cause the results to change, based on the filter you choose. Not shown in the illustration above are the Viewed / Not Viewed choices, but those will be explained (and illustrated) below. This article will run from the top of the Search Options panel to the bottom.

Filter By Result Type

The first set of choices allows you to filter the results to show specific type of content:

1. Videos
2. Reviews
3. Forums
4. Books (New)
5. News (New)
6. Blogs (New)

Video Searching

Video filtering was one of the first three filters available when Search Options launched. Select this, and the standard search results are filtered so that only video clips show:

Note that when you do this, as the arrow shows above, you get new “Any duration” filter options that let you further refine the video results to show clips that are short (0-4 minutes), medium (4-20 minutes) and long (more than 20 minutes) in length.

Video Searching Confusion

Like getting video results? Confusingly, the Search Options feature means you now have two different ways to get them on Google, which in turn produce different experiences.

Look at the very top of the search results page, and you’ll see a Videos link in the navigation bar (the top arrow in the screenshot below shows this). This was rolled out in May 2007 with great fanfare (see Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide). Click on that Videos link, and you get results back from Google Videos:

You’d think that for consistency, getting video results by using the top-of-the-page navigational link should bring back exactly the same thing you’d get by filtering for videos using the search options panel. But not so, as I’ve highlighted in the screenshot above.

For one, the ranking of results is different. Using the navigational video link, I got a result on replacing an iPod battery that did not rank in the top results when getting video using Search Options. Also, using the navigational link puts the first video results within a blue border, making it seem like an ad, even though it’s not.

More confusion. If you search for videos using the navigational link, you can still open up the Search Options panel — whereupon you find options that are NOT available if you do a regular search and then filter by video. In particular, the navigational link enables different display options (TV view, list view & grid view), along with options to see only high quality video, to filter by video source site (such as YouTube or Vimeo), to see videos with closed-captioning and more.

There are even more filtering options available for video searching, such as to filter by language or file type. However, to get these, you have to use the advanced search page at Google Videos.

Review Searching

Another filter available at launch is the ability to get back what are supposed to be product reviews. I used the word “supposed” because despite the promise, you’ll still get occasional “review” that can be puzzling. For example, here are “review” results for ipod:

Many of the results lead to good review sites (I’ve marked these “Good!” in the screenshot above). But down there at the bottom of the page? Yes, the web site that will not die — Wikipedia. I always joke that it’s required by law for Wikipedia to be on every Google search results page. Perhaps it really is a law.

I can already hear Google spam czar and all around debunker Matt Cutts winding up a defense. “If you look at the Wikipedia page listed, you’ll see there’s a criticism area and a useful history of the models.” True, but it’s still not what I’d expect when I’m thinking product review.

Neither am I thinking that the manufacturer of a product — in this case Apple — should be listed (twice). I went to both of those pages, by the way. Neither had product reviews.

In the middle of the page, you get a big huge shopping results OneBox unit. Hey, I thought I was getting review listings, not shopping listings!

As it turns out, those shopping results do have a nice collection of reviews, like you’ll see here, gathered from across the web. In fact, those listings seem better than some of the “review” listings that search options was giving me. So why aren’t these pages listed like “normal” pages rather than being confusingly tucked in a shopping OneBox? Why isn’t Google perhaps showing a better display of these (mostly user reviews) somehow mixed or set alongside editorial reviews?

Forum Searching

Forum searching was the third filter available at launch. It works well. You do indeed get back matches from online forums and other places where discussions are happening. Still, I’ve got gripes:

Note that the VMware Communities are both the second and the third major listings. Sandwiched between them are three more VMware Communities threads using the new forum sitelinks display. That’s five listings from the same site in all, showing up in three different places. Surely there could be more consistency here.

Book Searching

Last week, Google quietly added a book filter to Search Options. Select this, and you get back matching results for your search from Google Book Search:

Note that after filtering to matching books, you also get new options to see “Full View” books (that you can read fully online) or to show either books or magazines. The arrows in the screenshot above point to these.

The ranking of results seems to match that as if you went to Google Book Search itself. What’s missing are the many more filtering options that Google provides through Google Book Search’s advanced book search page (such as by author or by ISBN).

News Searching

The news search filter was added yesterday. Select it, and you get back matching news results from Google News Search. The ranking and display is identical, as best I can tell, to what you’d get at Google News Search itself. The main difference is that if you search at the dedicated news site, the Search Options panel changes to provide additional date filtering options and the ability to filter to just news images:

See the year blocks, like 2008-2009 or 1980-1989? You only see these when using search options via Google News.

In either case, there are even more filtering options such as news source or author which only appear if you use Google News Search’s advanced search page.

Blog Searching

Blog filtering is supposed to be added sometime today. As it wasn’t live when I wrote this article, I couldn’t test it. I’d expect it to bring back results from Google Blog Search and for the Search Options panel to reflect some, but not all, of the filtering options at Google Blog Search’s advanced search page.

Date Filtering

Filtering search results by date is hardly a Google innovation. Many search engines offered this in the past. However, it never really seemed to catch on. My personal theory was that most of the time when people are wanting to filter by date, they want to have “recent” results — which means news results. In turn, that means they should be using a news search engine.

Another complication is that knowing the “date” of a page has long been a messy business. Is the date:

• When the page was first published as reported by the web server (sometimes these give out incorrect dates)
• When the page was updated with new material? (such as an article that was written, then perhaps revised months or years later)
• When the page was first found by Google? (which might not mean the page was actually published on or near that date)
• The “date” that might be listed somewhere on a page, such as near the author’s name?
• The “offline” date (such as if an old public domain article from the 1700s is put online)

In most cases, Google tells me the date will be when it first visited the page, though it will try to combine various signals to come up with the best one to determine a valid date.

Date Inconsistency

That sounds good, but it’s pretty easy to demonstrate how messed up the date identification can really be. For example:

The first listing says “Sept. 15, 2009″ but in reality, that page has been on our Search Engine Land site at that exact URL for nearly a year. So, the date isn’t the “first visited” date. If you go to the page, you’ll also see that it has content as of Sept 25, 2009 — so that isn’t a “last updated” date being shown. As for the web server, it spits out a date of October 1, presumably because the page comes from a database. Each time it’s requested, that’s the “date” of the page as far as the server is concerned.

This all means the date Google shows is the date of the last time its spider visited the page. If you view the cached copy of the page, you’ll see the date there is also Sept. 15. However, that’s misleading. The dates on Google’s cached pages can be days, weeks or even months out of sync with when Google last spidered a page to update its searchable index.

The second listing seems to use the date as published on the web page, the date displayed to readers, in order to inform them of when the page was written. But then the third listing ignores that and like the fourth listing, seems to use the last visited date. Then the authored date gets used again, then for no apparent reason, the authored date gets ignored and the last visited date appears.

Date Options

My Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates is an older article that goes into depth about issues with dates, if you really want to know more. But despite the fact that dates might not always be accurate, I’ve personally used the filter by date option many times to successfully narrow down results in a useful way. Nor am I alone. The date and time options, Google tells me, are among the most used from those offered in the Search Options panel.

The date options are mostly self-explanatory. When Search Options was launched, these were offered:

• Past 24 hours (results with a date in the past 24 hours)
• Past week (results dated in the past week)
• Past year (results dated in the past year)
• Recent Results (undefined — in one test I did, results stretches back to the “recent” year of 2002. I’m checking on this)

At the end of July, a custom date range option was added, allowing for pages to be narrowed down between a specific period of time.

Today, a past hour option was added, allowing you to find pages dated within the past hour. That not good enough for real time search junkies? Last month, the Omgili Blog discovered a way to narrow results down to the last minute or even the last second, if you’re willing to play around with the URL that shows up after a search. It’s easy and safe. Our Hidden Google Feature: Find What’s New In The Last Minute Or Second covers it in more depth. For the record, Google confirms they work and simply calls them unsupported.

I joked about real time search junkies, but in seriousness, I have a severe allergic reaction to anyone who believes that Google finding a page in the last minute or second means it provides real time search. For me, real time search means finding a particular type of “real time” content. My What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article goes into depth about this.

Finally, let’s have a look at all the date options in context:

The top arrow points to the narrowing options you have. But once you’ve selected these, the bottom arrow points to a sorting option. By default, results are sorted by relevancy. However, you can sort by date within the range you’ve filtered. Do that, and the most recent comes first. There’s no oldest to newest option, which would be useful, on occasion.

Visited / Not Visited Pages

To me, the new Visited / Not Visited Pages filter introduced today seems like a really useful feature. Assuming you use Google’s Web History feature, you can have Google filter out pages you’ve already clicked on from its results or feature those pages and hide those you’ve not seen.

For example, I was looking for information on how to add Twitter to Google Wave earlier today. I’d heard about a program called Twave, so started searching for it. By using the “Visited Pages” option (in the screenshot below, look in the middle of the left column), it was easy to get a list of what I’d been to:

Notice the two arrows to the top right of the screenshot. They point out how Google tells me when I last visited the page listed (me visiting the page, not Google’s spider) and the term I searched for when I clicked from Google’s results through to the page.

All’s not perfect, however. Notice the three arrows further down. Technically, I told Google to do a search for “twave” and then filter out only pages that I’d visited when doing that particular search in the past. So why’s Daggle, my personal blog, showing up? Look at the bottom two arrows. They show I last visited the page on September 12 for a search on “daggle email,” not on “twave.”

The answer is shown in the description. See how I’ve boxed and pointed at the word “Twave.” I wrote a post about Twave on my blog. Google visited my blog, saw that word and so considers it a page I’ve visited before for a search on “twave” simply because that word is on the page — NOT because I actually searched for “twave” in Google and found my blog that way.

I especially liked the Not Visited option:

I can think of so many times I’ve done a search, then realized I was “done” with some of the pages I’d already seen but kept getting them back when I searched again. That was the case this evening, when the pages I viewed didn’t really have the answer I wanted. I need to look at some more.

Unfortunately, most of the other ones I hadn’t visited because I could already tell they were junk by looking at them. Yet the only way to remove them from the Not Visited list is to actually visit them? Ugh.

An easier solution would be if Google enabled its SearchWiki feature when you’re using Search Options. Then you could easily delete pages you weren’t interested in. For some reason, SearchWiki isn’t active when Search Options are used (for more about the service, see my Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide article).

Finally, you’ll only see the Visited / Not Visited pages option if you’re logged into Google and making use of its Web History feature. That will have an ick factor for some people, the idea that Google’s watching what you search for and click on. If you’re among them, well, don’t sign in and don’t use Web History. All the other search options will work just fine for you. My Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History story goes into more depth about the Web History feature. Like really, really in depth. It makes this article seem short.

View Options

Further down in the Search Options panel are four ways to view your search results, all of which were present when Search Options launched:

• Standard view
• Related searches
• Wonder wheel
• Timeline

I’m not going to drop a ton of screenshots and explanations about how these work, because I’ve already done that in my Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Refinement Features article. Check that out. The only difference is in that article, the “Related searches” option was called “Search suggestions.”

Results Options

Just below the view options area are results options, like this:

It’s confusing, I know. Didn’t we have a filter by results area at the top of the Search Options section? Yes, we did. And isn’t “More Text” a view option. Yes, it is.

The “More text” and “Images from the page” options were present when Search Options was launched. They show longer description for results and thumbnail images alongside results, respectively. That Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Refinement Features article I mentioned earlier explains more about the options, complete with illustrations.

If it were me, I’d move both of these options into the View Options section. As for the other two related to shopping, I’d put them into that other results options area — the one where you can get news, video, blog results and so on.

Let’s talk about those shopping optons. They’re brand new: “Fewer shopping sites” and “More shopping sites.” I’m sure they’ll also freak out some site owners who’ve long suspected that Google’s wanted to decommercialize (if that’s even a word) its results in order to push businesses into buying ads. And in fact, to some degree Google admitted that type of shift back during the major “Florida Update” of 2003. Not to boost ad sales, of course, but because sometimes people may want less commercial results. Well, now you can overtly drop shopping-oriented sites from your results or conversely, pump them up.

Here are standard results for rollerblade speedmachine, which as you can see are loaded with shopping results:

When I apply the “fewer shopping sites” option, however:

Away go some of the sites, with the boxes showing where new forum threads or blog posts have come in. Shopping results are still there, though kind of sad, I noticed a good dependable store I use personally disappeared. I’d like the feature better if it removed shopping sites with less reputation, if it’s going to leave some in. But I’ve also not done more than a few tests, so perhaps this isn’t the case with other searches.

Wondering what makes a site shopping-like? Google says prices are one of the key signals. You have a lot of prices, you may seem like a shopping store. Google also said things that just look and feel like shopping sites will get flagged. If your using certain words frequently associated with shopping sites, or a format that is commonly seen, that can also be an influence.

Conclusion

Don’t see some or all of the new options mentioned? Remember that for the Visited / Not Visited options, you need to be logged in. As for others, typically with these types of releases, it might take a few days for everyone on Google to see them.

Overall, I like that the new options are more visible, and it may perhaps be reversing the long standing conventional wisdom that searchers simply ignore options when offered through “advanced search” or other links. However, it feels like Google’s been so busy growing the Search Options panel that it’s failing to maintain consistency with the existing advanced search pages for some of its vertical search properties. I’d like to see them consolidate and be more consistent.

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 has announced several changes that are coming soon to Google Suggest, the feature that suggests search queries as you type.

The two most interesting to me are the inclusion of ads and direct links in the search suggestions. Let’s take a look, starting with the suggested links.

Navigation Links

If Google is confident about what you’re looking for, it may turn the first suggestion into a link. The example Google cites is a link to the official Kennedy Space Center web site as someone types “kennedy space cen.”

Users who already have access to the new feature have had fun trying to see how few characters they can type to get one of these navigational links; three seems to be the minimum found so far. Oh, and if you’re thinking there might be some favoritism at play in what links are tied to which queries — yes, typing “gma” brings up a link to Gmail, but typing “map” brings up a link to MapQuest, not Google Maps.

Ad Suggestions

In some cases, Google may show an ad at the bottom of the suggestions. And for now, ads will only show from advertisers that Google has whitelisted.

Google makes an interesting choice of words in its announcement to describe when this might happen: “…sometimes we detect that the most relevant completion for what you’re typing is an ad.” It’ll be interesting to see how often ads show up in search suggestions; we (and others) have noticed that Google has been placing ads anywhere and everywhere for the past several months.

Other changes announced today include:

• In addition to the home page, suggestions will be offered from search results pages, too, and the first few suggestions may be related to your most recent search.
• Suggestions may tailored to your search history (if you’re logged in and have Web History enabled).
• Result counts won’t be shown anymore.

Google says these changes will be rolled out gradually. There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

Google Blogoscoped spotted an interesting test at Google allowing searchers to refine their search results in various ways, including clicking through a “Wonder Wheel.” There’s nothing particularly game changing, but the test is interesting if only for demonstrating how Google will react when competitors suggest it is “behind” in the search space.

My separate post, How Google Shot Microsoft After It Took A Knife To A Gunfight, gets into the competitive aspect. Here, I’ll focus on what the new features offer, to those who have been randomly selected for the test. I’ll also explain how you can try them yourself, at the end.

For those with the features enabled, they’ll see a “Show Options” link at the top of the search results page:

Select that link, and you get a new version of the search results page, this time with search refinement options along the left-hand side of the page. These are options that let you “refine” or “restrict” your results in various ways, such as by date.

Restrict By Content Type

At the top of the list are options to restrict results to certain types of content, such as “recent” results, video results, material from online forums and online reviews.

We’ve known that Google has been classifying forum content for some time, having covered back in October how forum results were being flagged for certain types of searches. Before that, back in 2007, we covered how Google was spotted grouping results into categories such as “Comparison Shopping” and “Reviews.” But to date, there’s been no way to specifically indicate that you might want only forum results. I’d expect this option will eventually migrate to the advanced search page.

Here’s how it worked when I selected to view only reviews:

You can see how the top results were altered (Apple’s own sites disappeared) and were replaced with reviews (only one of which was about Apple the computer company, as Apple does mean more than that).

Here’s how it looked for videos:

Images & Text

The date restriction options I didn’t explore, as these are already offered to anyone via Google Advanced Search. Below these options are the ability to see results with more text — IE longer descriptions — and to see thumbnail images.

Standard size descriptions looked like this:

Choosing “More text” changed them to this:

Google, of course, just announced that it would be showing longer descriptions as part of its regular search results. Users can’t currently control when a description will go long, though using a longer query increases the odds. This new feature gives users direct control, and it’s something I’d also expect to migrate to the advanced search page or the Google Search Preferences page.

Another option allows you to see thumbnail images of a site next to each listing:

There’s nothing groundbreaking to this. I’ve lost track of the number of major and minor search engines over the years that have tried thumbnail displays. Even Google’s tested them at various times. Despite seeming like a cool feature, they’ve never caught on. But for those who want them, the new test program suggests Google might move forward with a way to add them on a opt-in basis, in the future.

Wonder Wheel

It’s Wonder Wheel that will really catch the attention of many, despite the fact it’s not a particularly new idea or ultimately even that useful as a search refinement feature. But it looks cool. In my search for Apple, when I selected the Wonder Wheel option, I got this:

The idea is that there are various “categories” or “topics” or “clusters” of search results that branch off from Apple, such as “apple iphone.” And when I clicked on that branch:

I was shown more areas that I could branch off into, such as “apple iphone verizon,” which brought up:

See the results off to the right? They’re all about the iPhone as it relates to Verizon. Each time you branch out via the Wonder Wheel, the results change to reflect the new topic you’ve chosen.

As I said, there’s nothing groundbreaking here. Why Search Sucks & You Won’t Fix It The Way You Think from me back in 2006 covers some similar implementations by others over the years, such as AltaVista LiveTopics from back in 1997:

These types of interfaces have a cool “gee whiz” factor when they appear, and for certain queries they can be incredibly useful. But for the most part, they haven’t seemed to resonate with searchers over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wonder Wheel makes it as a future option that any one at Google can use, but I doubt it will become part of a default view.

Timeline & Search Suggestions

After Wonder Wheel, Google offers two further refinement options: Timeline and Search Suggestions.

Timeline is still a Google Labs feature that shows tidbits of information graphed against a timeline for certain search results. Despite being in Labs, some people are seeing it out and in the wild. This began back in January, and anyone should be able to see this for searches on french revolution or american revolution. The actual timeline graph won’t show on those queries, but you’ll see “Timeline results” appearing as the last two listings.

Search suggestions places a huge number of suggestions at the top of the search results page:

Google recently announced that it has improved where it currently shows search suggestions, so that they appear more often for more queries and in more languages. In addition, rather than just showing them at the bottom of the page, it also now occasionally shows them at the top, as you can see in a search on engines. However, the test allows for showing more search suggestions than I’ve ever seen on the Google results page before.

Again, there’s nothing groundbreaking here. Search Suggestions On Steroids: Yahoo Search Assist covers the very sophisticated search suggestion system that Yahoo put into place back in 2007, and both Microsoft and Ask also offer suggestions.

See For Yourself

Want to play with these features? Google Blogoscoped has code that lets you opt-in to the experiment, and it has worked well for me and several other Search Engine Land editors. You can clear your cookies later to get back to “normal” Google. I don’t see any security issues in doing this, but you never know — so buyer beware, use at your own risk, no refunds, no returns.

Overall, I liked seeing all the offerings and hope many of them do make it to the advanced search or the search preferences pages. While they might not be groundbreaking or gamechangers, they are useful features for some, so should be made more widely available.

Earlier this year, Google Suggest finally made it to the Google home page. The feature suggests queries as you begin typing in the search box. Now Google is testing providing links to web sites, direct answers and even ads that appear within the Google Suggest list.

Not everyone will see these changes. Google’s showing them to a small, randomly selected group of people in the US. The experiment might end at any time and not necessarily become a permanent feature.

Below, you can see how when typing in the beginning letters of New York Times (new york t…), “regular” Google Suggest offers some suggestions to complete your query:

Now consider a change that some are seeing, where a link that leads directly to the New York Times appears:

It might also appear like this:

In the example below, a search for [space shu...] suggest actual news results related to the space shuttle recently being flown from California to Florida right in the drop-down:

I don’t have an example of an actual answer being provided in results, but that’s something Google says will come.

The most dramatic change is the inclusion of AdWords ads in this box. Here are some of the ones I’ve spotted:

In the one above, I started typing the characters [new...] and got an ad for Newsweek. When I continued on, doing [new york t...], rather than seeing a link to the New York Times as with the example shown earlier, I got this ad from the New York Times itself:

And here’s yet another ad I got when I started typing [up...]:

I’m somewhat concerned about the ads appearing at the top of the list. For one thing, I think it’s way too easy for people to click on an ad to reach a web site where Google should be sending them to for free (consider the New York Times example, where one case shows a “free” navigational link while the other is a New York Times ad).

Fortunately, Google said it’s also testing an implementation where the ads appear at the bottom of the list, like this screenshot they sent me:

I prefer this much more.

The ad test is yet the latest way Google is expanding where ads might appear in its services. Just some of the others in recent weeks are covered in the articles from us below:

• Google Expands AdSense For Domains

• Google Ads For Hard Alcohol & Liqueurs Now Allowed

• Drill, Baby, Drill: Google Finance Gets Ads; Google News Testing Them

• YouTube Formally Introduces ‘Sponsored Videos’

• Google AdWords: Now With Images

• Google Puts New AdSense Ads Under Maps

• Google Now Allowing Ads For Beer

• Google AdWords Allowing Gambling Ads In UK

Why change Search Suggest in this manner?

“This is another example of search becoming more dynamic and Google getting users to the correct results as fast as possible,” said Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google.

Overall, the links seem like a good idea. In many cases, they might save people even more time to find what they want than having to wait (even though it’s a tiny time) for the search results page to load. I just hope that if the ads stay, they move to the bottom of the list.

Yahoo has rolled out the Search Assist feature to Image Search. For example, a search for images on barack obama will return images within the actual Search Assist bar. Here is a screen capture:

To generate search assist image results, go to Yahoo Image Search and begin typing. If the query is popular enough and can be refined, Yahoo will show images within a different refinement category. So in the example above, the first image on the left, is a refinement option to see [barack obama family] pictures.

In addition, after you search, you can click on the little up arrow under the search box, to open up Search Assist. This feature, i.e. opening the search assist box after a search, is new.

Yahoo also said they will be launching Search Assist for Images on Yahoo.com soon.

Yahoo’s Search Assist had an impressive launch in July 2007. They then rolled it out in the UK a few months later.

Break out the birthday candles for Yahoo’s Search Assist and Google’s Toolbar.

Yahoo reminds us today that its Search Assist feature was launched a year ago this month. Search Assist is the feature that suggests words and phrases while you type in the Yahoo search box; it also suggests related concepts — something, Yahoo tells us, that no other search engine is doing.

And Yahoo can celebrate these numbers: Usage of search assist is up 60x since it was launched a year ago, and usage of related concepts has seen a 3x jump, according to Yahoo’s blog post.

The Google Toolbar, meanwhile, will soon celebrate its 8th birthday. And Google’s celebration includes the release of the latest edition of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

In their announcement today, Google calls out three new features in this latest edition:

• Add gadgets to your Toolbar to bring content from your favorite websites closer to you
• Synchronize your settings online to access your Toolbar from wherever you are
• Create multiple profiles in AutoFill to keep your business and personal information separate

Google says this new version of the toolbar is available in 40 languages.

Last year, Common Craft produced a great, short video explaining RSS “in plain English.” The company is back now with another wonderful one, Web Search Strategies in Plain English. It’s less than three minutes long and does a great job explaining how to use some of the most simple “power” commands at searchers’ disposal — the minus sign and quotation marks. Be sure to check it out! The video is also below:

Blink, and you might have missed it. Google’s now doing synonym searching. It’s something they quietly noted in a past Google blog post and one that comes up again today in a post that covers how Google uses experiments to improve the search interface.

Back to synonym searching in a moment. The main focus of today’s post is how small changes can have a big impact on how users interact with search results. Some before and after screenshots of various search results are shown. Most compelling to me was how by making the + symbol thicker in a "Plus Box" that allows for stock quotes to be shown for a listing, usage went up. But the post also highlights how that doesn’t mean it’s an improvement. More usage might mean people are missing other important information in favor of a new gadget. Such is the thoughtful insight that goes into measuring even little changes like this.

Midway in the post, we’re told this:

The algorithm that is responsible for the titles and snippets of result pages now highlights stems and some synonyms of the original query term. For the query [hp printer drivers] we will also return results that include and highlight the word "driver".  This sort of "stemming," as it’s called, is generally a good idea, because it helps you better identify results that match your query, but not always. Experiments of this sort help us verify (or, occasionally, overturn) our assumptions regarding changes in these algorithms.

Stemming on Google isn’t new. The company has been doing it since back in 2003. It was also highlighting stemmed words back then. If you searched for "running," and it found a page with the word "run," the word "run" would be bolded in the search listing description.

So highlighting stemmed words isn’t new. What is new is that Google now goes beyond simple stemming and does synonym matching.

For example, with stemming, a search for running might match:

• run
• runs
• runners

But it wouldn’t match:

• jog
• jogs
• jogging

This is because the word run doesn’t make up part of those words (stemming means that the word you searched for makes up the "stem" of other words).

With synonym searching — or concept searching or thesaurus searching, which are other terms used — you do a search to find matches for the original word, stem variations of the word, and words that are conceptually related to it.

Google doing searches for synonyms is a big change and one I wish wasn’t buried in the middle of this other post. It deserved highlighting on its own, or in another posts where it was mentioned, such as here in July:

It is critical that we understand what our users are looking for (beyond just the few words in their query). We have made several notable advances in this area including a best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system.

I remember reading that briefly in the middle of a trip and flagging it for follow-up. Google’s doing conceptual search now? When did that happen, I thought.

Anyway, it’s official now. I pinged Google for a bit more info, and they sent:

Yes, the highlighting of synonyms has changed. Also the degree to which we understand synonyms changes and improves, and this can affect the impact on highlighting the terms. The main point is that the algorithm does change. We mostly highlight stems, not synonyms, but the distinction is lost on most people."
 

One thing I hope will come soon after this highlighting is a flag to let people know if their search as been customized to match stems or synonyms. It can make a difference to searchers, and they may not realize it happening now.

Google Now Notifies Of "Search Customization" & Gives Searchers Control from last month covers how Google does such flagging in other cases.