Twitter Forces Google To Step Up Its Game!

It has been all over the news today that Google have introduced ‘time based search options’, which is pretty cool, but the article that I liked the most was the one over on mashable.com which argued that the Google announcement is very much in response to the threat of Twitter and other real-time search offerings:

real-time search offerings (i.e. Twitter Search, OneRiot, and Tweetmeme) are about to feel the power of the Google juggernaut. Why? Because of the release of Google Search Options, a new Google search feature that provides the user the ability to drill down search results by recency, content type, and more.

Announced today by Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search and User Experience, Google Search Options is an attempt to organize universal search results – ones that include news, blog posts, images, and videos. Once turned on (by clicking “Show Options” in any search result), the feature appears as a left-hand column next to search results.

Search Options has four different sections for filtering results. The first is the content drill down, which is already available on Google search. This is yet another way to filter video, image, news, or other types of results.

But as you look at the other options that are available, things get intriguing, starting with time-based filtering. When you search a topic and turn on Google Search Options, you will have the ability to look at only results created recently, within the last day, the last week, or the last year. If you’re looking for the most recent information on Brett Favre, Miss California, or the Pope, then Google Search Options allows you to just see the most recent content on those subjects. It could certainly be viewed a response to the buzz centered around Twitter (Twitter reviews)’s real-time search, which can often be a better way to track the conversation around major events.

One of the other cool things that Google has released with Search Options is Wonder Wheel, which is a visual representation of Google search results that you can’t miss – the text is rendered in classic multi-colored Google fashion. Wonder Wheel places your search topic inside of a light blue circle and places related terms around it. Search results still appear to the right of the Wonder Wheel. Google has also included Timeline in this update, another visualization of search results based on the date of the content.

Search Options should be live for all users by the end of today. Overall, it’s a search filtering system that gives the user greater control over what they’re looking for. Google is trying to make sure that they cover all the possible issues a user could have with search. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, then Wonder Wheel is useful . If you need the buzz behind the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch, then time-filtering comes into play. Make no mistake: users now have a lot more control over search results.

Before closing out Searchology, Google made two other interesting announcements. First was the announcement of Google Squared, a new Google Labs project launching at the end of May for showing Google results in spreadsheet form. The other was a new application for Google Android phones, SkyMap, which is exactly as it sounds – a detailed map of the stars and the night sky.

By way of example The Times didn’t make the link at all:

Google has devised new ways for its millions of users to narrow their search results to help them find what they are looking for.

The search giant, which dominates internet search in Britain and much of the world, will allow people to use search “options” to slice and dice the results available from the web.

When any user inputs search terms into the search box, at the top of the page above the traditional blue links to webpages, there will be a “show options” link.

This will open a variety of new ways to focus the search – by category such as only videos or only reviews (for a restaurant or product search, for instance) or by time.

Users can look for results within the last 24 hours, or even pull up a timeline of results. There is also a “related searches” option which suggests other possibilities and a new feature called the “Wonder Wheel” which graphically shows users how related topics are clustered together.

Marissa Meyer, vice president of search products at Google, said that the company wanted to improve its understanding of what searchers were looking for. The company was proud of its search engine but realised that there was still a long way to go before it delivered perfect results to every user.

The new set of features allowed users to “build the query from the ground up” beyond the traditional results page, she said. The search options features were being made available immediately.

Other products were also previewed at an event called Searchology at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

A feature called “rich snippets” is aimed at giving users more information about the content of suggested website links. The snippet is the set of information included under each link in the results page and Google will now add more than just the traditional preview text. For a restaurant review, the rich snippet might contain the numbers of stars in a review and the restaurant’s price range, for example.

“Google Squared” will present results in a format similar to a spreadsheet, pulling data from other websites and assembling it into columns and rows. For instance, enter “hotels in New York” and Google Squared will be able to provide comparative tables on cost, distance from a particular landmark and other information.

Google Squared may provoke controversy as it could give people less reason to click away from Google. If that happens, Google may face even more complaints about how it makes money from content created by other companies and publishers.

Ms Meyer said that the results in Google Squared clearly credited the sources for the data and could direct users to them.

Ms Mayer said that Google was only just beginning to solve some of the most difficult problems in search. She added that search was a “90-10 problem” and that the last 10 per cent of the problem – providing the exact information to users in the mode they want it – was the vast majority of the work. “The race in search is still far from over,” she said.