Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google's Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages.

Gupta told the SemTech audience that there are now more than 50 reviews sites using rich snippets, for example sites that offer restaurant reviews. Also there has been uptake on social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn.

The most common use cases are events (which was added in January) and recipe formats. Google is adding support for more formats, such as video, local businesses and shopping.

Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. As the below chart shows, microformats is more common than RDFa for this feature.

Google spent a good deal of today's panel continuing its drive to get webmasters to adopt rich snippets. It has a tool called the Rich Snippets Testing Tool, which helps publishers utilize rich snippets.

Finally, Kavi Goel from Google talked about how Google can accelerate growth of the ecosystem, noting that less than 5% of webpages currently have semantic markup. Google wants to see this rise to 50% or more. It is looking for critical mass, which includes adding more formats and encouraging more "beneficial peer pressure" for companies to support rich snippets. Goel cited restaurant review sites as an example - it's not just Yelp which supports it, but other restaurant review services too.

Rich snippets is an example of how the Semantic Web is being adopted by large and powerful Internet companies, so it's encouraging to see that Google is pushing for rapid adoption.

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.