The TV shortcut shows the title and a short synopsis of the next episode, along with video clips and links to see photos, the show’s schedule, and an episodes list. All of this content comes from Yahoo TV.

Although my LOST example above doesn’t show it, Yahoo will occasionally show links in the left column for related actors, shows, or movies. I’m guessing the query [lost] was a little too generic to prompt that.

There’s also a new celebrity shortcut that focuses on well-known actors and actresses. It’s fairly similar to Yahoo’s recently announced news shortcut in that it offers tabs to see news, photos, video, and Twitter updates about the celebrity.

If the celebrity has a Twitter account, that third tab will change from “Twitter” to “Official Tweets” and will display his/her Twitter stream.

Doing math through a search engine isn’t new. One of Google’s earliest parlor tricks was allowing people to enter math problems into its search box and get answers. Indeed, I use it for this more than my pocket calculator, these days.

Want to know 345,567 / 23? Enter that into Google, and you get back the answer: 15,024.6522:

You can do a wide range of functions using the Google Calculator. That “More about calculator” link in the screenshot above unfortunately takes you to this entirely unhelpful page. Instead, read this page buried in the Google help files to discover how the Google Calculator can do trigonometric functions, logarithms and factorials.

Fancy! But how about dealing with lowly fractions? Last night, I was dealing with problems like these:

56 2/3 * 3 1/2

I thought I was explaining how to do them right, as we worked through the homework exercises. But was there a quick way to double check? Well, I tried Google and got back:

For those who can’t see the screenshot above, that was:

(56 2/3) * (3 1/2) = 198.333333

That’s correct in decimal form, but the exercise required the product to be expressed as mixed fractions.  You know, a whole number followed by any fractional amount. C’mon, we all remember that.

I know that Bing also does math, so I tried things over there. I got back:

Again, for the screenshot-challenged, Bing processed my calculation like this:

56*2/3*3*1/2 = 56

Instead of doing fractions, Bing made some odd assumptions that I just wanted to multiple or divide the numbers that were next to each other. So, I tried it another way:

(56 2/3) * (3 1/2)

That just gave me a bigger mess:

And the text version:

(562/3)*(31/2) = 2,903.666667

This time, the space between the whole number and the start of the fraction was removed, completely changing what I entered.

NOTE: From a comment below, entering the calculation as (56 + (2/3)) * (3 + (1/2)) would have worked at Bing!

For those who want to read more about Bing’s calculator, see the Bing help page here. It can do a lot of functions even if it didn’t get mixed fractions multiplication right.

By the way, Bing does do fractions better than Google — that is, if you want a simple fraction expressed. Consider this:

300/35

On Google, that’s expressed as a decimal form only. But on Bing, you get both decimal and fractional forms:

As for the homework assignment, I gave search engines one more shot to help, this time using one that was built by a mathematician, Wolfram Alpha. How’d that go? For the example above, I got back this:

Awesome — multiple forms of the same answer. A decimal form. A fractional form. And what I wanted, the mixed faction answer:

198 1/3

I’m not sure if Stephen Wolfram’s grand ambition with Wolfram Alpha was for it to help me and my son figure out the multiplication of fractions. But it was sure useful!

Events In Rich Snippets

Adding to last year’s announcement of rich snippets for reviews and people, Google has created one for events, too.

Using the hCalendar microformat, Google will show information and links to specific events as part of the snippet below a search result. If you offer event listings, check Google’s documentation for more on how to use this. Note that Google says this will be rolled out gradually, and that using the hCalendar microformat won’t guarantee that rich snippets will show for your site.

Answer Highlighting

Google has also announced plans to add more answers and information into its search results. Google says it’s using the research behind Google Squared to power this effort to extract facts from web pages. When Google identifies a search as factual in nature, and can find the answer on a web page, it may highlight the answer in the snippet.

Google says this feature is rolling out “during the next couple days” on Google.com.

Answer Highlighting may have a negative impact on search traffic to information-based web sites. Rather than referring traffic to sites and pages like these, Google is now explicitly pulling the facts from these pages and showing them in its own search results.

Perhaps the main innovation here is the inclusion of content and information right inside the Search Assist dropdown. For example, do a search for a company’s stock symbol, and Yahoo will show real-time stock prices and a couple related links before you even execute the search.

Yahoo says similar features are available for queries related to sports, travel, and movies.

Search Assist can now also help users reach other Yahoo properties more quickly. For certain queries, Yahoo will show quick links to Yahoo News or Yahoo Images. For other queries, Yahoo will show deep links to other Yahoo properties, like Flickr or Yahoo Mail. Type “mail” while you’re viewing Yahoo Sports, for example, and you’ll get quick links to send an email, visit your in box, or create a new email address.

The new features aren’t available yet in the main search box on Yahoo.com, but are accessible in the search box of nearly all other Yahoo properties.

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’s had help pages like this before. For example, this one still remains, showing various special features such as the ability to get weather results. But this new page is being featured right from the Google home page:

The page frames many of Google’s features in an easier-to-read format:

And it comes with an introduction highlighting how serious Google is about search:

Search is at the heart of everything we do at Google. Our engineers work every day to solve the hardest search problems, and thus improve your online experience. Here’s a glimpse at what they do, the features they’ve built and the remarkable user stories that inspire our work.

As I said before:

Google’s never really had to market itself to consumers, to trot its stuff. The recently held “Searchology” event didn’t cover anywhere near the range of what Google offers. But if the praise for Bing keeps largely rolling in — if people keep discovering features that aren’t necessarily unique to Bing — Google may find it has to step up.

To me, this page is all about doing that stepping up. Of course, the page is well worth reviewing, for those who aren’t aware how Google can provide everything from sports scores to flight tracking. As can Bing, and as can Yahoo.

Here are some examples:

Google added limited translation as a OneBox over a year ago. But it seems like both Yahoo and Ask.com do not have smart answers for translation.

Hat tip to LiveSide for spotting this.

But when they miss an opportunity? That’s someone else’s job. And over the weekend, Rick Duncan did just that when he compared Google, Yahoo, Live Search, and Ask.com to see how they handled the search phrase, who won the kentucky derby.

The results?

Duncan says Live Search was the winner from his Sunday morning experiment, barely edging out Ask.com. I’d say they both win because they answered the query (and because I’m not interested in Mint Julep recipes). Have a look and decide for yourself:

Google and Yahoo provided no such quick answers, but Google at least had a result halfway down the page that showed the name of the winning horse.

All of the search engines provide quick answers at sports events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics. But it’s a mystery why Google and Yahoo overlooked thoroughbred horse racing’s equivalent of those major events this weekend.

Microsoft talks more about this special feature in a blog post from Friday. And similar to Microsoft, Ask.com also provides direct answers:

Now compare those to what you get on the same search over at Google:

No actual answers, nor is the first site the official Oscars web site, as you’d think would be most relevant (Microsoft and Ask both puts the official site tops, Microsoft right after the actual winners, Ask in between the winners and a lot of ads). At Yahoo, there are no direct answers.

Providing instant answers like this isn’t something new for search engines. They’ve long been offered. They’ve had different names at different search engines, but the concept has been out there for years.

But old tricks can still be good ones. For me, these type of specific answer searches can be a habit breaker when you know to expect them consistently. If there’s an earthquake, Ask.com has a long-standing feature that gives you a list of the latest quakes at the top of the page (try it yourself for earthquakes). I always check it for quake news. I absolutely love Microsoft’s snow report feature and go straight to Microsoft if I need to check on a resort (try it for Brighton, Utah).

Of course, Google has a long list of direct answers it provides, from weather to the current time. It’s no slouch here. But there’s still plenty of opportunity for competitors to stake out territory for certain types of searches.

So how do searchers fare in finding out what they’re looking for?

Superbowl start time

Google

Searchers are most interested in knowing what time the game starts and what channel to watch it on. The number one search (and the most descriptive) is [what time does the super bowl start 2009]. I hope those searchers weren’t feeling lucky, because the first web result on Google is for an article about the upcoming 2007 Superbowl. A news result appears before that, and it seems to be matched based on grabbing the words “super bowl” and “2009″ at random (and potentially considering “Star” a synonym to “start”). The second web result does in fact have the answer, albeit a bit incomplete.

Yahoo

Yahoo doesn’t fare much better. It lists a page with the 2008 start time as the first result (and that page links to a page about the 2009 start time).

The issue doesn’t seem to be a problem with the freshness of the index, because the Google Trends page that shows this is a hot query is right there at number 10!

Microsoft Live

Searchers on Live might miss the game entirely.

Like Google, Live has news results at the top that aren’t in any way related to the Superbowl start time. The first result that appears it might answer the start question is located all the way at position five. And it looks like it could be the only result on the entire page that would answer the question. Live is also the only engine of the three to show ads above the results, and the relevance of “1 Rule to Lose Your Gut” to the query is questionable.

Where are the official Superbowl sites?

The NBC and NFL sites were nowhere to be found in the top ten of any of the search engines. That’s not entirely the fault of the search engines, as both sites are hiding all of their potential content in Flash (and in the case of the NFL are adding the further obstacle of a 302 redirect from superbowl.com). Since search engines want to provide the best possible results and Adobe wants web developers to keep using Flash, this poor searcher experience just supports the notion that both should continue to improve Flash’s crawlability.

But it also reinforces the advice that site owners have to be aware of the limitations of technologies such as Flash. The fact is that if you want your site’s content to be found by searchers, you have to make sure you’re building it in a search-friendly way. You can’t rely on the search engines to sort things out.

What about [superbowl]?

Do the search engines do better at finding the official sites for a more generic search? We can see by the Google Trends data that searchers aren’t looking for just [superbowl] alone, but let’s give the engines an easy query for comparison.

Google

Google does pretty well, returning the official NFL page as the top result (despite the redirect and the Flash). However, since Google can’t read any text in the Flash and the page doesn’t have a meta description, Google has to resort to the dmoz.org description of the page for the snippet, which doesn’t mention the Superbowl at all, and that makes the result seem less relevant to searchers. It also has a pretty irrelevant ad above the results and that third result (”Arizona Super Bowl”) is another example of Flash and other multimedia causing searchability problems. The snippet is literally the only text Google could find on the page.

Google has substantially better results for the query [superbowl 2009].

Yahoo

Yahoo’s results are far better. The ad is pretty relevant, the Yahoo! Shortcut that shows up at the top of the results provides the game’s date and time (this would have been an ideal result for the previous query), and the first web result is for superbowl.com with a great snippet. (The rest of the top 10 are much more relevant than Google’s as well.) Unlike Google, Yahoo isn’t following the 302 redirect from superbowl.com to nfl.com/superbowl, and on quick glance, I’m not sure where they’re getting the snippet. (Updated to add: they’re pulling it from the Yahoo! Directory.) The Wikipedia result, enhanced with SearchMonkey, also helps the relevance of the results.

Microsoft Live

Live search has the right results, but to be honest, they’re kind of a mess. The ad above the results is completely irrelevant, the first result is an Instant Answer from Encarta that takes up too much room and provides details that are too vague. The first web result is the NFL site, followed by another Instant Answer from Stats Inc. that actually provides a pretty helpful result (the date, time, and teams). This is followed by a set of news results. All in all, there’s a lot going on here, and it’s difficult to sort out what’s a web result and what’s something else.

Live search has an odder Instant Answer for the second hottest query (according to Google Trends, pulling in details from “Holiday Origins”.

Will searchers find the Superbowl?

Searchers will undoubtedly try a few query variations and scan the result page enough to find what they’re looking for. But it’s clear both that events and questions drive people to search, and that search engines and sites still have a lots of room to improve in order to connect with those searchers.

Happy Superbowl viewing!

(By the way, in case you’re having trouble finding the details in your favorite search engine, the pre-game starts around 4pm Eastern on NBC and the kick-off is around 6:20pm Eastern.)