Fresher Search Results

Until now, if you wanted to see the freshest search results, you had to apply a little URL-hack, but now, this feature has become default in the Search Options panel.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to filter results by sites you have already visited and by sites you actually haven't visited yet. This feature only works when you are signed in to your Google account and have your Web History enabled.

Books, Blogs, and News

Google already introduced the ability to just search for books a few weeks ago, so this isn't really a new feature, but the company now also allows users to filter by blogs and news. While you could obviously always use Google News or Blog Search for this, you can now easily toggle back and forth between these sources and stay within the same search interface.

Shopping

Given how hard it has become to do product research on Google, as the search results are often cluttered with shopping sites, the ability to see more or fewer shopping sites is probably the most important new feature here. As Google points out, if you are doing research and aren't ready to buy just yet, being able to tone down the number of shopping sites will be extremely helpful.

Maybe this is not a bad thing. Bing clearly excels in some area (travel, health, and shopping, for example) and can easily compete head-to-head with Google when it comes to standard web searches. At the same time, Google's virtual monopoly position in the search arena (even if it's a natural one) wasn't likely to go unchallenged, and wasn't likely to pan out in a positive way for consumers. Now, if we trust these results from Compete's analysis, more users are using a larger variety of search engines instead of just relying solely on Google, which can only be a good thing.

As Rich Devine from ZAAZ points out in the Compete post, some of the early curiosity around Bing was surely driven by Microsoft's marketing campaign around the service. The data, however, also shows that quite a few users are willing to look at alternatives to their favorite search engines.

Not a Typical Week for Search

We have to note, though, that the last week of June was not a typical week for search engines, as the death's of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett drove more users to search engines, and this brought Bing's audience to over 27 million, up from 21 million in the week right after its launch.

As of now, Google's users aren't running away from the service and making Bing their exclusive search engine, and neither are Bing's users completely loyal to their service. In terms of its overall audience, Bing is also still small compared to Google, but this data shows that users might be more willing to explore alternatives than we used to think.

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.