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Google Unveils Search Options and Google Squared

Posted by Soulskill on from the just-the-useful-bits-please dept.

CWmike writes "Saying that its users are becoming increasingly sophisticated, Google has unveiled a list of new search technologies geared to help users 'slice and dice' their Google search results, along with a new tool to help them cull information instead of Web pages. Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google's Search Products, said of Search Options in a blog post, 'We have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the Web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment.' Google Squared, set to be released to users as part of its Google Labs program later this month, pulls up information from different sites and presents it in an organized manner."

6 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Chicken or the egghead? by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Culling data and presenting context-aware results is something that Wolfram is working on too.

    Wolfram, a genuine genius, against a company full of above-average engineers. It's a tossup as to who came up with this idea first.

    1. Re:Chicken or the egghead? by LUH+3418 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I would think they're pretty serious about this. Google pours alot of R&D money into improving its search engine. In their mind, I believe this represents another step closer to one day having a search engine that can truely understand questions asked by users, which really, is the ultimate goal for any search engine.

      It seems obvious that for them to publicize this now is a response to Wolfram Alpha, but clearly, Google wants to keep is technological edge over the competition. Now, what will be interesting to see is how much people care about these new search options, and whether or not someone buys Wolfram Alpha.

  2. new search pair of dimes? by thedonger · · Score: 3, Interesting
    from TFA:

    "These features really explore search from a broad and entirely new perspective," said Mayer. "Because we realize that when you can't quickly find just the exact information or content you need or want, it's our problem, not yours."

    This is an interesting take on the process of searching. In the past I thought good searching required training or insight, but this line of thinking - putting the onus on the search provider - is bold and interesting.

    Will Google offer the traditional "colander with wires attached" USB device to read our minds and ignore what we type into the search box? If so, it better be free or people will complain.

    --
    Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
  3. Blocking results from certain sites... by blahplusplus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... would be the most important in my opinion of "user sophistication", a lot of times google will pull a lot of sites quite frankly should be able to be punished by users by users beign able to filter them out of their search results.

    That might cause google to pause (ad revenue) but personally there's a lot of google manipulation and I'd love it if users could simply FILTER their results but NOT be able to change them and then let google study which sites are blocked or not to get an idea of how clueles (cluefull) their userbase is

  4. Too specific by Hadlock · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has anyone else noticed google's search results are a little too focused, or personalized? I am finding that useful search results that I had clicked on that were only tangenially related no longer come up when I search under the identical terms a second time. While this is good in most cases, I'd like a way to switch off this "focused laser" approach and open up my results more broadly without having to dig past the first 10 pages of results. I feel like google is so specific that I either find my result in the first three results or not at all these days. I feel like I am missing out on the wonders of finding cool stuff that you didn't know existed, since the results are too good and almost never off topic.

    --
    moox. for a new generation.
  5. Content owners won't they lose revenue by Jeez01 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    lets say you want to research Bulls-Pistons series in 1988 and you decide to use a squared which effectively parses and gets the data you want from Basketball-reference or one of those. Those sites will not get any page hits...