Google Adds Visited Pages, Past Hour & Fewer Shopping Sites Filtering

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.