Google Unveils Search Options
Like reviews, people also look for forum results for products, in which case, they are looking for only recent discussions. Such a query may be difficult to form, but now with search panel options all you need to do is click on forum results and specify a timeline. The search panel also makes it easy to switch between different types of content such as videos, forums and reviews. Google has also tried to improve the snippets of text that it culls from the web pages and presents under each search result. These rich snippets are supposed to show more contextually useful information, such as the actual sentiment of the reviewer in the case of reviews. You can even click ‘more text’ to increase the length of the snippet. This will probably mean never having to go to the actual page at all. To make ‘rich snippets’ work properly Google hopes that web publishers will adopt micro-formats or RDF a standards to tag relevant data.
As for what’s in store other than these options released, there is something known as Google Squared, that’s on the Google drawing board and soon to be unveiled under Labs. Google Squared won’t just find webpages about your topic but instead, it is supposed to automatically fetch and organize facts from across the internet.
Another feature in the works is Wonder Wheel. It gives you a graphical representation of search terms. You can click on any node to explore related queries. You can keep clicking nodes to drill deeper into a subject and look at a holistic view.