TechPulse 360

Google’s Search Option panel is for me the most important announcement made today at the company’s Searchology press conference at the GooglePlex.

Available as of today on the Mountain View, Calif.- company’s Web and Images search engines, the search option panel – that appears on the left hand side of the screen after clicking on the “show options” link at the top of the search results page – lets users slice, dice and filter results in a few clicks: by content (video, forum, reviews), by date (day, week, year and even a timeline), display image stamps right on the results page and the cool Wonder Wheel!

The Wonder Wheel feature is a visual way to look at search results. The Flash-based interactive application starts with the searched keyword in the center, and related terms around it. Clicking on one of the related term puts it in the center of the circle, etc… Reminds me of the “social graph” Altavista launched in the late 90s!

Google also announced two other anecdotal products: Google Squared, which extracts information (details, values…) from a search result and present it in a spreadsheet form (available in Google Labs in a couple weeks); and Rich Snippets, which shows extra metadata in a search result’s preview text just below the URL to help users make more informed clicks.

This is the second Searchology event organized to update Google users, partners, and customers on the progress made in search and launch new features. At the first Searchology, two years ago, Google launched Universal Search, a feature that blended results of different types (web pages, images, videos, books, etc.) on the results page.

Here’s a Google video on the Search Option panel: