Software developers, product designers and manufactures can learn a lot from Google.
They churn out new features at an incredible rate. Their new ideas are (mostly) useful. They donโt wait too long before releasing their offerings to the world (Gmail is still in beta). And they donโt dilute a great product with superfluous features.
Their latest most visible development has been the addition of a discrete link at the top of the search results:
Click it and youโre offered a number of options to refine your search:
However itโs the options themselves that are most interesting.
Videos already exists on the top navigation, yet theyโve seen fit to include this in the new options too. Stranger still is that clicking the top link gives slightly different results than the options.
Forums and Reviews also strikes me as an interesting development, as they suggest that an increasing number of people are searching for peopleโs experiences of a product, as opposed to the manufacturer and people selling it.
And the Any time options suggest that searchers are more interested in whatโs being said now โ as opposed to what was last indexed. Google will of course be monitoring which of these options are popular, and my guess would be that if recent results are in high demand, Google will be looking at indexing and displaying new content more quickly than at present. Three cheers for that idea.
And while I can see how Images from the page may be useful for recognising a site, Iโm very intrigued by the More text option, which simply displays more text for each of the results.
Compare the two:
Itโs worth noting that Google strive to stay ahead of their competition, and donโt simply try to copy and improve their better ideas. They also use the vast amounts of data that they have access to for their own ends. The canny online business wonโt just be looking at Googleโs new features and smiling or grimacing at them. Theyโll be working out how to use them to their own advantage.
Read the signs.
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