In the past few weeks, Google has added a new Show Options feature that allows you to bring your searches to a new level. Here we give a brief description of how some of these features work and how they may affect your business.
Videos
Video search is nothing new to Google, but this option allows you to further sort videos based on attributes, such as length or date.
Forums
Users can now tap into online conversations and gauge the ‘buzz’ about a topic. You can see what people are saying in discussion groups and how many people have contributed to the discussion and when the last reply was posted.
Review
This reviews filter lets users enter a product name and see all recent reviews of that product. It will also highlight quotes that Google feels will provide an insight into whether it’s a positive, negative, or neutral review.
Date Timeline
This allows you to get results for a specific period of time. You used to have to do this using Google Advanced Search but this is a lot easier. Recent Results brings up all recently indexed content related to your search.
Wonder Wheel
This option generates a visual interactive map, pointing to topics related to a search. We’re not sure about how useful this option is, but it looks fun!
How the new features may affect your business
If you update your website regularly and have fresh relevant content, we believe these changes will probably not affect your business. The ability to refine searches to look at the last week or the last 24 hours could present a problem for some businesses if you haven't updated your site in that period.
Even though the changes may appeal to some, we believe they won't make a huge difference for day-to-day users. People generally like using Google because of its simplicity but with these extra options, a simple search would be more complicated.
One area that you should also take action is to try to make sure your web pages included optimised images as Google is now showing images on your pages in the results with this new feature.
Read more about Google's Show Options here.
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