Google Announces New Search Features

Google recently announced three new updates to its search service:

• Search Options will helps users prune their results and generate different views to locate desired information. For example, a query for recent forum discussions about a specific product can filter the results to include only forum sites and limit the results to the past week.

• Rich snippets will extract and display expanded summary information, including page-specific attributes, to help users determine the relevance of their results. Queries for local restaurants, for example, might include reviews, the restaurant’s average review score, and price range.

• Google Squared takes another step towards semantic search and “automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet” and creates a spreadsheet of structured values that can be saved for later reference. Google Squared will become available to users later this month on Google Labs.