Happy Dude

Google showed off some of its new search features at an event at its Mountain View headquarters on Tuesday

One to keep an eye on as an idea known as Google Squared it works by Google extracting information from multiple websites, and then working out the common values and presents the results in a spreadsheet format.

For many online publishers, this future will look scary. It implies that for some types of information Google will become a destination site, not intermediary.

It is still in the early stages of develpement so still time to rejig those business models and with new ways of search emerging every day like WolframAlpha, a “question and answer” service due to debut next week, the long-term implications are huge: like the Semantic Web, these services point to a time when online services like Google draw on a network of linked data, rather than just a network of linked documents. At that point, users should be able to query the data without ever needing to visit the underlying sources – at least in theory. Making the quality of search for the user more valuable but at the detriment to web publishers.

They also showcased the new Google Search Options, which is a new panel that will appear in the left hand column of search results, it gives users tools to refine their own search results – for instance, based on date. (pic above)

All in all interesting times yet again in the online world