Google slices and dices Australian searches

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 13 May 2009 03:38

Your IT - Home IT

Google has added a wide range of new search capabilities to its Australian search engine, which enables users downunder to slice and dice results in ways previously not possible. At least some of the new features were developed in Google's Australian office.

The Australian search enhancements are part of a general beefing up of Google search options announced today on the official Google blog, arising out of the company's annual Searchology event held in Silicon Valley.

The list of new Australian search options includes:
      

• Reviews and Forums: Show only pages with this type of content

• Videos: Show only pages with videos in them, and see a video thumbnail.

• Date restricts: Show results from the past 24 hours, past week or past year.

• Timeline: Histogram-like representation of results by year and month.

• Wonder Wheel: A graphical, interactive representation of searches related to your query. This is based on technology originally developed in Australia, more and better search refinements.

According to Google the new earch options will help users solve tricky queries and get the to the results more easil.

For example, you may be looking for forum discussions about  a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place  more recently.

With new search options, you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an  option to only see results from the past week.

The search options announced at the recent Searchology event include:

• Rich snippets: an enhanced version of the preview text shown search results which Google calls snippets. The enhancement will display structured data from the page as marked up by the site's owner. The additional data surfaced on rich snippets, such as a product's price or number of stars in a review, is designed to help people understand what the page is about and let them make a more informed click. For now at least this is available only on www.google.com searches in English. Google is appealing to web publishers for help saying on its blog, "We can't provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface."

• Google Squared: a search tool designed to help people quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic specified. For example, a user curious about which roller coasters are the fastest, tallest, and longest in the world can type [ roller coasters ] into the search box and click Square it to see an automatically generated table of roller coasters and their attributes.

• An update to Sky Map: an Android app that lets users view a labelled map of the sky that adjusts to both their location and the movements of their mobile devices. The app uses GPS and Compass data, as well as the Date/Time, to determine what celestial objects the device is facing at a given moment.  If it is pointed towards Venus, for example, users will see a labelled map of the sky with Venus and the objects surrounding it on your screen.