Google Launches Search Options, Declares Real-Time Search Biggest Challenge

May 12th, 2009

Google has just launched a new “search options” feature on its main search page. When you click on “Search options” you can filter your search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a “wonder wheel” view, or a timeline view.

At Google’s Searchology event, which is going on right now, Marissa Mayer listed the following as the hardest unsolved problems in search:

- Finding the most recent information
- Expressing that you want just one type of result
- Assessing which results are best
- Knowing what you’re looking for
- Expressing your searches in keywords

Notice that real-time search is the No. 1 problem. (Twitter and a bunch of startups from OneRiot to Tweetmeme are also working on it, with the latter two launching their own real-time search efforts today). But it is not the only problem. Some of the new options address the difficulty of searching through time. The recent results get as real-time as Google can get, but you can also expand the timeframe back. And you can look at an actual timeline of results, which looks for dates within results and then places them chronologically. The Wonder Wheel is more of a visual aid to see how different related topics are clustered together. When you click on any spoke of the wheel, it then causes that search term to be at the center. We’ve seen many of these techniques in teh past, but Google is giving them a higher profile by putting them in its main search page..