ReadWriteWeb

Google just announced some interesting enhancements to the Search Options side panel it introduced earlier this year. In total, Google is adding nine tools to the sidebar: past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news. Thanks to this, you can now, for example, restrict search results to sites that were updated within the last hour, or you can tell Google to tweak the number of shopping sites that appear on a search results page.

According to the latest data from Compete, Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, is still going strong, though even a month after its launch, the majority of Bing's users still switches back and forth between Google and Bing. About 66% of Bing's users also use Google search, and this number has held steady over the last few weeks. 30% of Bing's users also use Yahoo Search, and about 4% use AOL Search. The most interesting aspect of this report, however, is that Google's users seem to be far more interested in trying out a new search engine than users of other services.

At today's Searchology event in Mountain View, ReadWriteWeb had an opportunity to talk with Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience at Google, about the new products the company announced this morning.

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.