Google Searchology has become kind of an annual event which is used to showcase the search related products and enhancements the Internet giant has to offer. In the preceding two years, Google used it for showcasing Personalized search and Universal search enhancements. On May 12, 2009, the search giant organized the event to introduce three new features for its search:

1. Refined search options
2. Google Squared
3. Rich Snippet

The guest speakers were:

1. Udi Manber, VP, Engineering (Core Search)
2. Patrick Riley, Software Engineer
3. Scott Huffman, Engineering Director
4. Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience
5. Nandu Jankiram, Associate Product Manager
6. Alex Komoroske, Associate Product Manager
7. Kavi Goel, Product Manager
8. John Taylor, Software Engineer

So let’s start off with the first feature i.e. refined search options. This concept is invoked when the search term is highly ambiguous or may contain a small data set. Think of it terms of a query that you would type when you really do not remember a concept or are diving in untested waters. You type in a query and get search results. If Google thinks that the results may not satisfy you query, it serves up some suggestions which might be more meaningful to you and Google has a better data set for the alternatives. Actually, it is quite easy for us to search for something and click on the result which we think is relevant and land on the appropriate page. What happens at the backend is the real intelligence. But for some keywords the backend intelligence fails to clearly demarcate between the results and displays vague results.

This means, from now on, a normal Google SERP may contain 13-14 results for some vague queries. Have a look at the diagram below to get the proper understanding. I entered the query “web” and Google displayed the following results:

Another feature accompanying the refined search option is a deep down drill and options for results display. If you have a look at the SERPs, at the top left hand side you will see a link names as “Show options…”

On clicking the link you will notice a change on the page. The whole page will shift rightwards and on the left hand side a new section will be visible. It will be something like this:

Using these options you can narrow down your search as per your specific needs. The best part of using these options is that you need not to browse through the Preferences section or move to Google’s advanced search options. Just click the fields as per your preferences and witness the change in the results. I would like to touch upon two of the most useful options incorporated in this section which are Wonder Wheel and Timeline.

Wonder Wheel is one of the most fascinating and useful option Google has introduced for getting you closer to what you want. It will provide extremely refined results to the searcher and will act as a virtual guide to help the searcher achieve her specific search based needs. For example, if I want to know about India, I will have to enter several queries to do so. But with the help of the Google Wonder Wheel, this mundane task becomes interesting. As I enter the keyword “India” in the query box, the text results are displayed at the right hand side of the page and in the middle of the page we can see the wonder wheel having various other search options clinched on its branches:

Now I have so many options available to choose from and click on the option I want to know about. Now suppose, if I click on the option “facts about India”, the diagram changes to:

Notice the change in the text results on the right hand side. A great utility that will help you drill down for topics. And helps Google understand web graphs better. Based upon what you click, Google understands how users relate to topics and which suggestions are off-topic, in its wheel of wonder! For some commercially oriented queries, the non-display of Adwords ads is non-explicable. It may be a temporary glitch which Google will be keen to fix ASAP.

Timeline is again a very useful method of knowing about anything and everything since its conception. Use the timeline feature and enter the query, you will have a set of results arranged in the chronological order.

Further, you can click on a specific year and know about the news and happening related to the search query for that year.

The second feature introduced by the search giant was Google Squared. This feature is really cool. Although computer science has advanced a lot, still there are many unsolved problems for which it has no answers. One of them is how to extract the data online and arrange it automatically in the spreadsheets. A step towards making the web more organized. With Google Squared, Google has tried to address this issue and the timing seems to be directed towards Wolfram Alpha. When you execute a search on Google Squared, it results rows and columns of data pertaining to spheres of information that are thought to relevant and related for the query. Say you are searching for a sports car; the results will be customized according to related attributes such as Sport car manufacturers, colors, engine capacities, price and other relevant factors. Moreover, these results can be exported into an online spreadsheet program whereby it can be entered into a database. Google’s Associate Product Manager Alex Komoroske admitted that there is still a good amount of work has to be done on Google Squared and will be launched in Google Labs by the end of this month.

Wolfram Alpha has a slightly different and extensive approach. Wolfram alpha is a startup and is projected as “never before” computational engine that has answers to all your queries. You go to Wolfram Alpha and type in a concept and it ‘computes and calculates’ the replies that can be fitting. It has many kinds of calculators and logics built-in which answer a typical user query instead of just guessing as to which document might best resolve a searcher’s query.

Last but not the least, a rich snippet feature that displays meta data from the pages to display additional details about it in the results. To enable it, webmasters are required to incorporate open standards such as microformats or RDFa. At present, Google does not guarantee that the presence of such metadata will result in rich snippets, but webmasters can request a consideration via this form.

Let’s see how Google’s rich snippet works. For example, if a user searches for “drooling dog bar b q” (a restaurant in San Francisco), then he will see the following results:

When you look at the fourth result, you see stars and 17 reviews written between the title and description. This is the rich snippet feature. As you can see there are four stars and 17 reviews for the restaurant in a reputed directory like Yelp, the user gains confidence that this might be the page that contains the information he is looking for. Rich snippet is quite useful from the user’s point of view as he may get some useful information regarding the resource in question. There are rumors that Google might use this feature for the ranking purposes or deciding upon the relevancy. But as of now, it has not come up with any official statement on it. But they might do it if the results prove useful.

At present rich snippet supports reviews from sites such as Yelp and people with their profiles on LinkedIn. Over the time new sites and categories will be added.

If you wish to watch the Searchology 2009 event, click here.