Google continues to work to address the threat posed by the real-time search capabilities of services like Twitter and Facebook. Google just rolled out 9 new ways to add options to your search to get optimal results.

This past May, Google they launched “Search Options” to allow users to refine search results by content type and time (within the past day was the timeliest you could get). The new filters enable users to quickly sift through the ‘haystack' returned by the default search to find the proverbial ‘needle' more efficiently. These features include search options including the ability to search within a specific date range like past hour and specific date range; shopping site filters; a visited pages filter and an option to see only results from Google’s book, blog, and news search tools. 

Most of the options are relatively self explanatory.  The shopping filters are kind of spam filter if you fewer shopping sites. When you choose more shopping sites, product prices appear up top.   And if you are trying to go back to something you’ve already seen but can’t remember exactly where it was, you can personalize results by seeing only sites you’ve already visited. Or you can choose to only see new sites, and make the search more of a discovery tool. But the visited/not yet visited pages features will only work if you have Google Web History enabled and you're logged into your Google account.

The Books, Blogs and News filters are all similar.  Click on these filters to see results only from these sources. Putting these filters together, along with videos, forums, and reviews, allows you to quickly switch between different source types right on the search results page.

You have been able to run searches like this for a long time, but you had to learn some obscure search tricks. The “past hour” filter is the most interesting addition. While Google offers other timely ways to get information such as Google News and Google – the vast majority of users simply turn to its search engine.  By giving users the option to filter results from the past hour, they’ll see more current news and information as opposed to the Wikipedia entries and other high ranking content that dominate the top of many results in regular search.  Google is playing catch up here in the sense of making their results as timely as those found on social media sites.

Many of these features have existed in Yahoo or Bing and Google is just playing catch-up as the Google-Bing rivalry drives Google to even more frequent updates to search. By continuing to innovate as well as copy, Google is ensuring that they will remain atop the search mountain.