Week 6- Newspaper Article

The article I chose to write about this week is a very interesting article that was written by Miguel Helft and published in The New York Times on September 30th. The title of the article is Google brings new options to Search. They are simply adding ways to slice and dice one of the most used search engines.
Yesterday Google introduced more categories to its “search options,” a feature that was introduced in May that basically allows users to filter results by time, type of result, and other criteria. It is said that the new search options allow users to filter for results Google found in the past hour, and for books, blogs and news. Google also added the ability to emphas9ize or de-emphasize shopping-related results. It will also allow users of its search history feature to see only results they have seen before, giving them a quick way to find a page they have already seen. It is said that all the new options were intended to give users a quicker way to get to the information they want. Google introduced a string of other new search features in the past week. On Friday, for instance, Google enhanced search snippets for some results, allowing users to jump directly to the information they were looking for inside a Web page. In a search for trans fats, for example, a user might see a Wikipedia entry and links to jump from the snippet directly into sections of the page that discuss the chemistry of trans fats, their presence in certain foods or nutritional guidelines. On Monday, Google began showing its popular hot trends directly on results pages for some of the most popular search keywords at a given time. And late Wednesday, Google added links to discussion forum entries to search snippets from sites that have such forums. For instance, a search for “getting from Rome to Florence” will return a result from a travel site, with links to discussion forum entries on that site that touch on the topic.
I think this will become a very helpful tool. Google is already one of the most used search tools and is known nationwide. I also think that Google will come across some problems and/or bugs if they have not already occurred. They might be overloaded with searches that are very specific or perhaps there might be a case where the user is too specific and has no results thus not being helpful at all. Overall, I feel that this is a great addition to the Google family.