Google has added new custom search options yesterday which are now accessible in Google Search. The following four options have been added to Google Search:

• Past hour and Specific date range: With these tools you can choose to see only the most recent results in our index, or see results from a specific time period. This can be particularly helpful when you’re looking for the freshest information, or if you have some idea of when the information you’re looking for may have been published to the web.
• More shopping sites and Fewer shopping sites: Now you can choose “More shopping sites” to show additional commercial pages and display prices from those pages right in the search results. If you’re doing product research and are not quite ready to make a purchase, you can choose to see “Fewer shopping sites” to filter out many of the commercial sites.
• Visited pages and Not yet visited: Rediscover pages you’ve visited before by clicking “Visited pages,” or filter out the websites you’ve seen by clicking “Not yet visited.” This can be particularly helpful when you’re researching something you’ve already explored and you want to return right where you left off. To use this option you’ll need to be signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled.
• Books, Blogs and News: Click on these filters to see results only from these sources. Putting these filters together, along with videos, forums, and reviews, allows you to quickly switch between different source types right on the search results page.

The past hour and specific date range parameter was accessible through url parameters before only. The inclusion in the search options makes it easier to use this parameter. Search engine users can now increase or decrease the amount of shopping sites that are displayed in the Google search results which can be very handy depending on the type of search performed.

Visited pages and not yet visited is only available for users who are logged into their Google account and have web history enabled. This can be interesting to continue a search at a later time without having to revisit pages that have been visited before. Books, blogs and news finally allows to refine search to only see results from these sources. They are similar to the previous source filters which allowed search engine users to only display results from sources that were videos, forums or reviews.

It would be interesting if Google would reveal statistics about these custom search options to see how many search engine users make use of them. Which leads to this question: Have you used the custom search options?

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The time based search option for example is an exact replica of the feature found in the advanced options. It lets a user narrow down search results by time. The remaining options on the other hand are not the same and can change Google search drastically. The first filter makes it possible to narrow down the search results by type. It is possible to only display videos, forums or reviews.

Selecting a filter will limit the available filters in the other categories. This is however a great way of finding video, forum or review resources in Google. The forum and review filter seems to have the occasional unrelated entry (e.g. a non-forum link in the forum filter) though.

Probably even more interesting is the option to display more text and or images from the pages in the search results. The first option will expand the space of every search result in Google and fill it with additional text from that website. The second will display thumbnail images of images found on these pages. It is only possible to select one filter at a time but they do change the way the search results are presented dramatically.

Lastly there is an option to display related searches, a wonder wheel or a timeline which are also displayed on top or on the left of the search results page.

These filters will remain active all the time until the user changes them again or leaves the Google page. Google managed to add some interesting search options to their search engine which help filter and expand the search results effectively.

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