Starting today, if you perform a search on a particular category, Google will display some of the most popular and referenced items within that category. It will also include the three top sources of this information.

The improvements here aren't just about suggested links in broad categories. Google also says that, if applicable, related searches will display images. If you search for an artist like Van Gogh, for example, a selection of his artwork will show up at the bottom of the page. Similarly, if you search for a film, the related search will include cast members.

On the front-end, this should make finding related material easier for users. And behind the scenes, the technology isn't entirely new. Google has accomplished this with its Google Squared technology, something it introduced into Google Labs in 2009. Google explains the process as such:

"To better understand and answer your searches for a list, we use a variety of signals to assess what the web collectively thinks are the most significant items associated with your search keywords. Since Plato is discussed so frequently in pages about Greek philosophers, our algorithms can infer that he is an important Greek philosopher."

As this work is based on common search patterns and is another example where Google's algorithms try to predict what it is we're actually looking for (or at least what Google thinks we should be looking for).

Great for Users, But What About the Sites that Supply these Answers?

For users, this is a nice step forward as it makes it easier and faster to get the answer you are looking for. It will, however, be interesting to see how website owners will react to this change. After all, if you don't need to click through to the site to get the answer, the site that produced the content won't be able to benefit from Google's traffic.

Also New: Rich Snippets for Events

In addition to this change, Google also announced that it is introducing rich snippets for events. Rich snippets allow webmasters to annotate their pages with structured data that can then be displayed in the search results. In the case of events, Google could, for example, display upcoming events at a theater or concert hall right on the search results page.

Squared is now more selective about the data it includes. And it also learns from edits and corrections that users make.

New: Export Data to Google Spreadsheets and CSV Files

In addition, Google gives users the option to export data to a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file. This should make it a lot easier to actually do something interesting with this data. As an example, Google explains how to build a list of African countries and then create a scatter plot that examines the relationship between GDP and literacy rate in these countries.

Will You Give it a Second Try?

Overall, the data that Google Squared now returns does indeed look more accurate than in earlier versions, though some results are still rather strange (to be fair, this is still a Google Labs product). We do wonder how useful a service like this really is. Are you likely to head over to Google Squared for research? Would you trust its results?

The user interface is inflexible, the data is odd looking and it's hard to imagine using Squared regularly. It's a great idea but we'll see where it goes.

All the other queries we tried were similarly "almost helpful." The dog breed example is actually unusually good. Sorting by a particular column isn't possible, when I define a content type you don't get to see it unless I share it with you, and the user experience is an off mix of intriguing and maddening. The description fields would benefit from borrowing the first few lines of a Wikipedia article on a topic.

It is very impressive that when you request a square for a concept Google is unfamiliar with, you're prompted to offer up to five examples and then it goes out and builds the data set for you! Unfortunately, when I tried to explain to Squared who some examples of "tech bloggers" were it brought back a terrible picture of me and said that CNet's Caroline McCarthy is sixty four years old. I'm pretty sure that's not true.

We're as excited as anyone about the future of creating structured data from the sea of information online, but Google Squared isn't very inspiring so far. We've been looking forward to it since interviewing Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google, about Squared. When the day comes that you can slap a .xml or .csv to the end of one of these Squared URLs and pull out data programatically, that will be impressive.

Here's our review of Wolfram Alpha, which we said was likely to be a good service for engineers but not for anyone else. Hopefully it's still early days for all of these kinds of tools.

The features announced today, and in particular 'Search Options', build on Google's Universal Search announcements of two years ago at the same event. Universal Search integrated search results from across Google's properties into the main search. It began with images, maps, books, news, and video - and over the past two years it has added products and blog search.

Then last November, Google introduced SearchWiki: the ability to add, annotate, and remove your search results.

So with those two sets of changes alone, Google search added more types of content (including multimedia like video and maps) and some read/write functionality (which Google termed a "wiki", to the bemusement of the inventor of the wiki).

Today's announcements are centered around some of the themes in the current era of the Web that we at ReadWriteWeb have been exploring recently: real-time information, adding more meaning to the data (aka Semantic Search), and filtering results. The new features show that Google is adapting to this environment.

Rich Snippets and Google Squared: Google Getting Clever With Data

According to Google, rich snippets "extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing." Significantly, Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. It is inviting publishers to mark up their HTML and webmasters can find more details here.

Image from Matt Cutts

At Searchology Google showed a preview of a new tool called Google Squared. This as yet unreleased product has already been compared to Wolfram Alpha, a "computational knowledge engine" that we reviewed in detail recently. Google Squared doesn't find webpages, like the normal Google search. Instead it "automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet." The product will be added to Google Labs later this month.

Our take: Both Rich Snippets and Google Squared show that Google is getting smarter about data, adding more context (Rich Snippets) and new ways of searching and organizing (Squared).

Search Options: More Options, More Clutter?

Now let's look at Search Options, because it is the most immediately useful of the announcements today. And more than the other two, it shows how much the core Google search experience has evolved. The 2-minute video from Google below is a good introduction to the feature.

The screenshot below shows Search Options in action. The highlighted part shows the new link.

When the user clicks on 'Show options...', a sidebar pops out on the left with a variety of options including multimedia, reviews and time-based views:

Our take: When you ponder the above screenshots, bear in mind the Google experience of 10 years ago. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that there are now significantly more options, links, on the Google results page. The ramifications of that are pretty clear: Google has evolved far beyond the simple 1-feature product it once was. Simplicity and focus on the core search experience were the principle reasons for Google's success. It's why Google usurped the bulky search-portals of the Web 1.0 era - Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, and their ilk.

Nevertheless, Google has been careful to gradually and relatively slowly introduce these new features to its core search experience. And the actual webpage search links still dominate most of the page real estate in the above screenshots.

The big question is: will making the core search experience more complex make Google more vulnerable to competitors that actually want to compete on features? Microsoft for instance is constantly trumpeting its next generation search plans. Google search got so popular precisely because of its laser focus on solid, simple good search results.

Or is it that the world of information and data has gotten more complex and so Google is just sensibly adapting to the environment?

There is certainly more media and interaction on the Web in 2009; and users are demanding real-time updates. So we're inclined to believe the latter view - that Google is cautiously adapting to the environment, without losing its core focus. If it didn't evolve that way, up and comers like Twitter would become more of a danger; moreso than relative dinosaurs like Microsoft and Yahoo.

Let us know whether you agree, or not, in the comments.

Google.com, circa May 1999

The event, which we live blogged earlier this morning, is the second Searchology event; the first one that was held two years ago introduced Universal Search. Today, Google announced Search Options, Google Squared, Rich Snippets and a whimsical but brilliant new Android application named Sky Map.