Did Google Let The Search Cat Out Of The Bag?

Shortly after announcing last week’s “Search Options,” Google offered a peek behind the scenes of its decision-making process and how the company arrived at the current version of Search Options. But they did reveal a little too much in the process?

Google Operating System did a close examination into one of the screenshots Google shared showing designs that weren’t used:

That image includes several search options that aren’t available in the live version of Search Options, including:

• show results in certain languages
• show/group results by topic
• show results on a map
• group results by people
• group results “by topic on a map”
• show page previews of each search result
• show pages “I’ve seen before” or “I’ve never seen”

Page previews has been done before on Ask.com and other sites. There’s a hint there about a people-based search coming from Google. The last one seems interesting — the ability to change search results to include or remove results that you’ve clicked on before.

It begs a couple questions: If these options were included in some of the unused designs, how come they’re not available in the current Search Options menu? And, are these some of the enhancements we’ll see in the future?