3 replies to this topic

[seo_bright]

I have just seen the link 'show options' in the google search page and it contains links like forums, videos, reviews results and also results sorted by time. Its really cool.

[Randy]

Yeah, I got a subscription notification the other day where they added a YouTube video clip about the wider release of their Search Options thingee.

I'm not sure how much I'll use it, but it did seem pretty neat that they were able to tell one type of site from another. More power in the hands of the searcher is usually a good thing.

[dietcola]

I love the wheel option -- i like how it plots trends and related to things -- a more interactive and relationship based way to search -- however i do wonder what is going on in the serps atm, algorthmic changes on the horizon me thinks...

keep up the good work google!

DCx

[Michael Martinez]

The problem with their filters is they don't show you everything they know about. For example, for several years people in the SEO community have known you could add a parameter to your Google query URLs and see results that Google had supposedly indexed within a specific time frame. However, that feature never worked reliably because you could easily find recently indexed content in Google's index that did not appear in the date-based searching. I find that the Options-based filtering is providing no better information in that respect.

Perhaps Google is only showing us pages that are fully included in the Main Web index when we use these optional filters. It's impossible to know why they don't show everything that appears in the Main Web Index. But the options are unreliable and you should be careful not to assume they are showing you everything Google has found within those parameters.

With respect to the date filter, I've often found results in the regular search that were annotated as being "indexed 4 hours ago" or "1 day ago" which would not appear in the filtered results. And if you do a date-range site search you'll find far fewer documents than if you just do a normal site search. But does that mean all the excluded documents are in the Supplemental Index? I don't think so. Sometimes the excluded documents are important URLs that are updated in Google's cache data frequently.