K’s Weblog

Those clever gals and guys at the Google Labs are at it again. There’s a new enhanced version (the “universal version”) of search which combines results from image, video and text components in a single search result. This began to appear last weekend in search results from most of the major Google localizations…

But that’s not all, folks!

By visiting the Google Labs, you’ll find that there’s an even more enhanced version (the “experimental version”) of search in the pipeline. I’ve got a brief overview of some of the features, and how you can put them to work for you now!

Additional Views: Timeline and Maps

With your Google search, you can choose to have the search return a timeline or a map with the search results. This is a very interesting feature as it can provide some visual aid to help you with your search results.

The timeline is constructed using date/time data extracted from the search result pages. The timeline will allow you to drill-down to a more granular view if the topic has a broad history.

The map search really looks to be nothing more than a new way to search Google Local. Nothing all that groundbreaking here.

You can use this today in your searches very simply by adding: view:timeline or view:map to the end of your search query. Below are a couple of examples:

Star Trek view:timeline

NHL Teams view:map

Keyboard Shortcuts

I’m a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts for very nearly everything. I find that sometimes a mouse is just too clumsy a method for navigating some computer systems, particularly those that require you to type in other things (like search engines!) Google has implemented a few shortcut keys in the experimental version which may just save you those few precious moments of frustration.

The other neat thing about this is that the next and previous buttons will move to the next or last page if you’ve already arrived at the bottom of a page of results.

Hacking this one into your daily life isn’t quite as easy, you must add &esrch=BetaShortcuts to your search URL. You can however use this Google Link as your starting page to incproprate it.

Left and Right hand Search Navigation

In the “Spooky Google” category are the new adaptive left and right hand search bars. These attempt to ascertain other search refinements which may help you find what you’re looking for. I say “spooky” because I assume they’re using your personal search history to decide what to show…

The left-hand bar is much like a drill-down bar. It will show search options which are more specific than what you initially searched for. The example provided is “ipod” will show things like Patents, Products and news, with specific searches for “ipod accessories”, “ipod software”, “ipod reviews” etc… See it in action here or enhance your search URLs by adding: esrch=RefinementBarLhsGradientPreview to your search URL.

The right-hand bar shows similar information in a smaller package. It adds an option to see Blogs which didn’t appear on the left side bar. See it in action here or enhance your search URLs by adding: esrch=RefinementBarRhsPreview to your search URL.

This feature is not as polished as the first two. When I changed the search term from ipod to Macbook, all of the specific searches disappeared. But I guess that’s why they call it experimental.

Final thoughts?

As time moves on Google will continue to provide additional enhancements to its search engine. The most useful feature, for me at leasts, is by far the keyboard shortcuts. The adaptive search navigation has potential, but obviously still needs work. With challengers like Search Wikia on the horizon, things will need to continue to improve to keep searchers coming back.

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