Google just announced some interesting enhancements to the Search Options side panel it introduced earlier this year. In total, Google is adding nine tools to the sidebar: past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news. Thanks to this, you can now, for example, restrict search results to sites that were updated within the last hour, or you can tell Google to tweak the number of shopping sites that appear on a search results page.
Google will roll these changes out gradually over the course of the day and expects them to be available globally in English by the end of the day.
Fresher Search Results
Until now, if you wanted to see the freshest search results, you had to apply a little URL-hack, but now, this feature has become default in the Search Options panel.
Another interesting new feature is the ability to filter results by sites you have already visited and by sites you actually haven’t visited yet. This feature only works when you are signed in to your Google account and have your Web History enabled.
Books, Blogs, and News
Google already introduced the ability to just search for books a few weeks ago, so this isn’t really a new feature, but the company now also allows users to filter by blogs and news. While you could obviously always use Google News or Blog Search for this, you can now easily toggle back and forth between these sources and stay within the same search interface.
Shopping
Given how hard it has become to do product research on Google, as the search results are often cluttered with shopping sites, the ability to see more or fewer shopping sites is probably the most important new feature here. As Google points out, if you are doing research and aren’t ready to buy just yet, being able to tone down the number of shopping sites will be extremely helpful.
