More Google changes ahead…

Just so us SEOers don’t get too comfy, Google is rolling out some interesting adjustments in the coming weeks they are calling “Search Options”. Aimed at supporting the more sophisticated searcher, we’re looking at 3 new enhancements for users to adjust their results based on features like timeliness, result type such as image or videos, or a desire to see search results in visual form. Google cites “For example, say you are searching for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently,” as an example of this.

Google also announced a “rich snippets” feature which will apparently show key features of a web page. A restaurant may see their menu for example. From what I can gather it is only applicable for certain sites who have a partnership with G. If that site provides reviews, a feature of those review may appear in the search results:

Apparently Google is picking this information through markups on pages (microformats and RDFa) and is something that will be rolled out gradually. This increases the importance of collaboration between coders and marketers which does not also happen as smoothly as we like. This also brings us a little closer to the Semantic Web vision that Tim Berners-Lee has been talking about for years now.

Google Squared is another addition to the Labs and appears to offer a more “visual” display of certain search items and from what I can see, is better suited for researchers than your general searcher. According to Matt Cutts:

“[I]f you typed in ’small dogs’ then Google would try to return types of small dogs, along with facts like how much they weigh. It’s easy to add a row to the Square, so you could add a row for Lhasa Apso and Google will try to infer the relevant facts from the web. You can also add new columns, e.g. if you type ’energy level’ then Google will look for corroborating facts across the web and try to guess the energy level of each type of dog.”

Sounds smart. Also sounds like something that is trying to go head to head with the much talked about Wolfram Alpha search engine (or more appropriately computational knowledge engine). We have yet to see this in action and most of what we hear could be just hype.

Search is in a very interesting space right now and as usual, Google is not sitting still. It also means that we don’t sit still either.

Paul Fleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.