New Google search filter helps cut down on commercial clutter

Writing on the official company blog, Google product manager Nundu Janakiram on Thursday announced a new range of Search Option tools, including a functionality which limits the amount of shopping sites displayed in each batch of results. Janakiram said the features will be available worldwide by the end of the day.

Google Search Options were first rolled out in May. "As people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems," Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer wrote at the time.

"To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment," Mayer added. "We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it."

Search Options, which can be accessed by clicking on the blue bar under the Google logo, included at first a range of graphical options – users could see charts of related search terms, and a timeline of items related to the search term. (See video below.) The new additions announced today include the ability to filter data by hour and date range.

Users can also twist the dial to see more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, or results sorted by visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news.

The new functionality comes at a pivotal time for Google, which has watched Microsoft's Bing make inroads into the search market. According to the analytics company comScore, Bing captured an additional .4 percent of the US search market in August – a gain that puts Bing at a 9.3 percent market share.

Google, by comparison, holds 64.6 percent. As we noted earlier this month, a new batch of figures released by Nielsen put Bing as the fastest growing search engine in the United States.

––

iPhone MMS update makes AT&T happy. The users? Not so much.

“We are pleased with the roll-out of MMS,” an AT&T spokesperson said Friday. Yet many ran into frustrating stumbling blocks trying to activate the service.

––

Are you on Twitter? We are. Follow @CSMHorizonsBlog