Google introduces new search options

Google has introduced new options to search that are intended to make life easier for users.

The new options - nine in total - are hidden in the left sidebar and allow users to filter results by the past hour or a specific date range; they can be specified to look only within blogs or for reviews; and enable the user increase or decrease the number of shopping sites they get in the results. Up till now the search results could only be reduced to news, images, videos or certain languages.

Product manager Nundu Janakiram and software engineer Patrick Riley announced yesterday in a post on the Googleblog that the changes would be rolled out over the day. They can be found by searching with Google and clicking "Show options" in the blue bar under the logo.

The Google timeline and the wonder wheel are now better integrated in the search results

The option of showing fewer shopping sites is an important new feature as searching for products has become nearly impossible on Google, since the results are full of search engine optimised shopping sites. It has also made it possible to rediscover pages you've visited before by clicking "Visited pages," or filter out the websites you've seen by clicking "Not yet visited." And it presents a better integration of specific views of results like the "Timeline" or the "Wonder wheel" rehash the data further to bring the historic or contextual information to the front if wanted.

On Monday, Google announced that it was adding its "Hot Trends" feature to its main page search, allowing users to see how popular their search is at any given hour. Now, when you search Google and your query matches one of the top 100 fastest-rising search terms, it shows you a graph at the bottom of page, with more information – like how popular the query is, how fast it's rising over time, and other useful data.

Google's new search is another setback for Microsoft's search engine Bing, which still delivers better image results, but doesn't allow you to refine your search results in the same interface. Bing recently faced its first monthly decline as its share fell to 3.25%. Google globally has a quasi-monopoly with a market "share" of 90.54%