Did you notice these new features on Google?
1. Search within a Date Range and Sort by Date.
While this was available to “geeks” before, Google has made this really simple now. Pick a date range from the search results page using the “show options” link.
Important! If you pick a date range (say, search posts within the last year), Google allows you to sort by date. If you have over 1,000 results, this allows you to see the 1,000 most recent results as opposed to the “most relevant” as decided by Google.
You can also use the cool graphical UI for “timeline” available under the “show options”.
2. Search Nearby.
Looking for resumes? You can search for your usual “intitle:resume OR inurl:resume” and then just select the target geographical area and not worry about area codes, zip codes and all that!
Let’s not get too excited though: the Nearby search on Google will only pick up some results; a lot of those will be from local universities. If you would like fuller coverage you may want to use all those area codes, zip codes and city names just as you used to.
3. “Images from the page”. Please note, this is different than the image search. This will help you decide which pages to view; there are other creative uses that I will write about later.
4. Page previews is another cool option.
5. Pages Not Yet Visited (as if Google had heard a question from the audience at the recent #trusource event in London!)
6. Option to Search in Discussions
Remember reading about clever Boolean strings that bring up forum posts? No need to try very hard now since Google provides that. The options are: 1) Forums 2) Q&A. You can also sort by date and choose between short, medium and long posts.
7. Updates (real time search) Google introduced it about 2 months ago. The recent addition to your real time results now include facebook and myspace, in addition to twitter.
Please note: you can’s access some of these features from the Advanced dialog and can’t have Google alerts send you based on these selections. You need to be on the results page to access the features. If you are technically inclined, try noticing the URLs of your search results and you can then create prepackaged strings for reuse.
Happy Googling!
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