Google brings more Search options to Kiwi searchers

A press release from Google New Zealand:

Today, we’re starting to roll out a significant new feature on www.google.co.nz for New Zealand web users: Search options.

Available on the Google results page, Search options lets you slice and dice results and explore queries to quickly and more easily find what you need. For example, you can select:

• 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.

Search options helps you solve a potentially tricky question: what query should I ask? For example, you might be looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. With 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.

Check out the Official Google Blog for more information: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-other-updates.html.

Search options was announced at our annual Searchology event in Mountain View, California, where we provided an update on recent innovations in search at Google and announced other new features including:

• Rich snippets: an enhanced version of the preview text we show for search results which we call snippets. The enhancement will display structured data from the page as marked up by the site’s owner. We think this additional data surfaced on rich snippets, such as a product’s price or number of stars in a review, will help people understand what the page is about and let you make a more informed click (available only on www.google.com / searches in English)

• Google Squared: a search tool that helps people quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic specified. For example, you’re curious about which roller coasters are the fastest, tallest, and longest in the world. Until now, you’d comb through dozens of webpages to compile the information you’re looking for. With Google Squared, you’ll type [ roller coasters ] into the search box at and click Square it to see an automatically generated table of roller coasters and their attributes. The tool is still in an experimental phase at this point (available in Google Labs soon)