The web’s biggest brand has introduced a whole new suite of search interfaces. But what is a ‘Wonder Wheel’?
Google’s groundbreaking ‘Show Options’ reviewed
15 May 2009
Never one to stand still when it comes to product development, Google has set the blogosphere alight with the release of new search options - a range of interactive features which despite hiding them under a modest link titled ‘Show Options’, actually promises to fundamentally change the way users search for information on the web.
The new option, which appears on a results page when logged-in users perform a simple search, was revealed during a press event called Google’s Searchology.
Among the many new services offered under ‘Show Options’, a few could prove particularly useful for business - not least the PR industry, which has been criticised of late for its slow adoption of online reputation management across social media.
Highlights of ‘Show Options’ include:
Forums
Potentially one of the most exciting new features, users can now tap into online conversations and gauge the ‘buzz’ about a topic, be it a pop star, news item or brand. Results provide an indication of how many posts were made, various authors and when the last post was made.
According to Google, only two people talked about ’social media experts’ in forums around the 15th May 2009.
Reviews
Want to quickly know how well your product or service has been received by customers? A new reviews filter lets users enter a product name and see all recent reviews of that product. If this wasn’t helpful enough, Google then goes further by pulling out quotes it feels will provide an insight into whether it’s a positive, negative, or neutral review. It’s not yet known if Google will issue webmasters with guidance on how they can flag their review content to be more visible to Google’s indexing searchbots.
The screengrab above shows a number of reviews we’ve about Cimex. Scary stuff, but clearly a valuable tool in the monitoring of a product or service.
Timeline
As one of the biggest recipients of the world’s everyday needs and wants, Google is well placed to interrogate billions of search queries to reveal an insight into emerging social trends and ‘buzz’.
Rather than tracking the instances of any given keyword or phrase in websites, the timeline feature gives an insight into the use of a term throughout history, including terms which pre-date the internet. We can only guess that Google does this by indexing historical websites - but the idea that the search giant’s software is somehow ‘reading’ these websites to estimate a word’s usage by date is, if true, simply mind boggling.
Apparently, the word ‘Cimex’ dates back to 4000BC. Fortunately, we’ve updated our hosting servers a few times since then.
Wonder Wheel
This feature will no doubt appeal to fans of Visual Thesaurus. Nothing new as such, but this fun interface might prove helpful for those seeking inspiration during keyword research and link building for SEO.
Video
Video search is nothing new to Google, but the way in which they’re presented is. Users are allowed to search for videos by timeline, along with preferences on whether you wish to view videos with a short, medium or long duration.
Google Squared and Rich Snippets
If these services weren’t helpful enough, Google has also revealed its plans to rollout more innovative search services very soon: Google Squared and Rich Snippets.
Put simply, Google Squared is universal search on steroids. Rather than mixing video and image results in with standard text based results, Google Squared places every vertical into a table with clickable rows and columns.
Rich Snippets meanwhile is about rich media and sounds similar in sentiment to something Ask.com experimented with a while back - namely giving users a preview of website pages to help them decide whether they’ve found the right information, without the need to visit the site. Google should, according to reports, show these ‘rich’ results whenever a website has a relevant HTML insert present in its code.
Brace for impact
Some of the more rabid corners of the blogosphere may dismiss Google’s new tools as nothing new - indeed, many of these services already exist in various forms as part of enterprise software or web applications aimed at the marketing, communcation and PR sectors.
But as is the case with many of Google’s more ambitious services, the real value lies in the fact that they’re all on offer in one place, they’re easy to use and, perhaps most importantly, they’re free.
As such, the bigger questions remains: if Google’s new search tools do to online PR what Google Analytics did to the premium analytics market, aren’t many of the start-ups offering enterprise PR and brand management solutions now facing a pretty bleak future, before they’ve even had chance to gain a foothold?
Read more about our services in social media and online reputation management.
Find out how Cimex can help improve your visibility in search engines.