Have you noticed a change? I have. And although at the time I didn’t stop to take a closer look, you should. Why? Google are committed to relevancy and continuous improvements. This is why they are the most popular search engine on the planet. And I think it’s great how they strive to improve upon everything they do. It’s what makes a leader.
So, what have they done? When you enter a word or phrase, such as scotland, you will see a search results page with context-relevant left-hand navigation, which has a number of search tools and refinements. And what I like about these additions are that google have tested them over several months with users and they’ve incorporated the user feedback. It’s a common-sense approach to developing software, but you’d be surprised how few developers do this.
The new navigation lists news, images, blogs, books, videos, maps, shopping and discussions, all related to the word scotland, each with it’s own page of search results. But when you click on news for example, the news page is immediately displayed without reloading the web page. I think it’s a great feature. You get a lot more search results for no extra effort.
You can watch a short video from google about the changes. There are other additions too. You can view results in the timeline of your choice from the past hour to the past year, show sites with images or web page previews. I think it’s another way that google is cementing it’s position as the internet’s number one search engine.
I’m hoping google will continue to improve our search experience.
