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 don’t wait too long before releasing their offerings to the world (Gmail is still in beta). And they don’t 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 you’re offered a number of options to refine your search:
However it’s the options themselves that are most interesting.
Videos already exists on the top navigation, yet they’ve 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 people’s 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 what’s being said now – 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, I’m very intrigued by the More text option, which simply displays more text for each of the results.
Compare the two:
It’s worth noting that Google strive to stay ahead of their competition, and don’t 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 won’t just be looking at Google’s new features and smiling or grimacing at them. They’ll be working out how to use them to their own advantage.
Read the signs.
