Google Unveils New Search Products

Days before the planned launch of the Wolfram Alpha search engine, Google on Tuesday announced a series of new search products intended to provide more relevant results.

The new offerings include Google Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets, and an astrology-related Android app.

Google Search Options is a "rich set of tools that let you slice and dice your results," Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, said during a presentation at Google's Mountain View headquarters.Specifically, once you conduct a normal Web search, you can drill down with different genres, including elements of time, visualization tools, recently added, blogs, or images, combining a variety of Google search products into one.

The idea is to combine relevancy and "recentcy", she said.

Doing a normal search for "shuttle launch" could turn up results from any number of shuttle launches in countries around the world. Using Search Options, you can choose to search Web sites or blogs that were updated in the past 24 hours or week, increasing the chance that it will include results pertinent to this week's launch.

Choosing "images from the page", meanwhile, will display pictures pulled from the site alongside search results.

During the demo, Mayer and her team also searched for "solar oven" to demonstrate another feature of Search Options, dubbed sentiment analysis. If you are searching for reviews of solar ovens, for example, the program will try to determine if a particular review is positive, negative, or neutral and display that in the search results.

Search Options also includes a timeline that displays the popularity of the topic searched over time.

Search Options also includes a feature known as the Wonder Wheel. The term "solar oven" would be displayed in the middle of this wheel, with related searches branching out from it in a circle. In the same way that you might weave your way from a Wikipedia page on Google to a page about tropical fish thanks to the hundreds of links within Wikipedia posts, you can click on the various Wonder Wheel "arms" and crawl into a nice little search wormhole.

Next up was Google Squared, a Labs project set to debut later this month. It is similar to Search Options in that you can drill down your search results, but Squared lets you add or delete results to produce the most useful "square" of information that you can save to your Google account and refer back to later.

Rich Snippets, meanwhile, is intended to provide you with more useful information in the blurbs that sit below the URL on the search results page. Searching for a restaurant, for example, could produce a Yelp review with a snippet that shows its average rating is 4 stars based on 17 reviews – a more useful return than a line with its name and address.

Google updated snippets in March to increase the number of lines in the snippet for longer searches, but Tuesday's announcement was geared more toward webmasters.

Starting today, Google will be supporting open HTML standards not just for formatting, but for the meaning as well. Those who want to participate in Rich Snippets can add quick tags to give Google a better understanding of what on their pages, Mayer said.

Google also announced an update to the Sky Map Android app, which uses GPS and the compass sensors in G1 phones to produce constellation maps.

"Not only does it know where on the planet [your phone] is, it also knows which direction you're holding the phone," said creator John Taylor.

Google made improvements in performance, redesigned the user-interface, and made it an official Google app. Users can now search for specific stars or constellations. Hold the phone in the air and a circular arrow will direct the user to the spot in the sky where that constellation is – changing from blue to red as you get closer.

It is available in the Android Market starting today.

Mathematica founder Stephen Wolfram next week is expected to launch Wolfram Alpha, an upcoming search engine that aims to more thoroughly answer Web users' questions rather than just serve up existing data.

Udi Manber, vice president of engineering at Google, said that he and Google co-founder Sergey Brin were given a demo of Wolfram Alpha "early on, but we were asked to be confidential about it and we respect that."