Earlier this week Google hosted it’s second Searchology event, in which they presented users, partners and customers with the progress they have made and informed them of all the new features that they plan to introduce.
During the first event that was held two years ago they enlightened listeners about their new Universal Search, which saw the integration of images, videos, books etc. on their results pages.
In the past two years this Universal Search has come on leaps and bounds, with the addition of new types of results, the expansion into new countries and an increase in the amount of queries that the feature is triggered up by ten times the amount for that of two years ago.
So as time progresses Google are continuing to improve their features and want to further increase user satisfaction when it comes to providing them with the information that they are looking for.
Here are the new features that they proposed at the recent event:
Search Options
Their first announcement at the Searchology event was the concept of their new Search Options.
This feature allows users to filter the results from different sources that they are interested in, such as forums, videos and reviews and also filter by the age of the post / review / video etc.
Rich Snippets
Another new feature that was announced was to improve ‘snippets’, which is the bit of information found with each search result that provides a little piece of information about the result to give the user an idea of what that page is about.
Google now intends to add ‘richness’ to these snippets, to make the information included in them as useful to the user as possible.
For example, if a user wanted to find out about a particular restaurant / bar / club etc. then they could filter the search options to just see reviews. Then with the introduction of the new ‘rich snippets’ the average review rating and price range for example of each result could appear within the snippet, saving the user having to manually crawl each web page to find the information.
Google Squared
The final concept that has been introduced is a new tool called Google Squared.
This tool is different to the original search engine, as instead of returning web page results for a particular search query it will provide a list of facts, gathered from across the web.
This will be available on Google Labs later this month.
All these new features will once again allow webmasters the opportunity to take full advantage of the Google search engine and potentially increase the organic traffic to their site and this is how:
- Firstly, websites should begin to use videos, reviews and forums etc. to add content to their pages and therefore have the potential to gain more organic traffic due to the new filtering options now available on Google.
- Similarly, webmasters should regularly add fresh content to their websites, then they would increase the likelihood that their pages are returned in the search results for searches that are filtered by time.
- Finally, these changes should also reiterate the importance of creating good content and using top quality images, as searchers will now have the option to see these on the SERP’s and bad quality could have an undesirable effect on click through rates.