Google search has been pretty static for quite some time, the search giant is usually pretty slow to make changes to its main sections of the site, namely search and the homepage. However, Google released on May 5, 2010 screen shots of the changes that are coming to Google.

Google has always been my search engine of choice, it just made sense and was the easiest of all the search engines I have ever used. I will admit, however that Bing really caught me off guard with that amazing homepage layout, sometimes I just visit their site to look at the interesting photos. Sorry, back on track, Google has made some pretty big (small) changes.

The first thing you will notice is a much improved sidebar experience. Google has now added a sidebar to the search results, you now have a ton of different options (like you did before with a bit more work to find them) of narrowing down your searches. On the sidebar now of Google search you have: Everything – which is the normal, vanilla Google search, News, Blogs, Images, Books, and a drop down menu called more, much like Google has on their main navigation along the top of the site. This will allow you to search each section more easily and quickly. Sometimes I had to Google “Google Blog Search” in order to find blogs that were relevant to my searches. Not anymore.

The second thing you will notice on Google is some more color! Well, not really but they have added some new icons, which are still just blue and green, but it is a start I suppose.

Google also has a new feature called Google Squared, which is available through the always fun Google Labs part of the site which basically allows you to find and compare different things. A great example of Google Squared is one of their sample searches on the Google Squared website located at: http://www.google.com/squared/ which is a search for “best picture oscar winners” and it brings back up a table of all of the Oscar winners from every year and has them sorted in table format for easy viewing. Way cool. I think it feels a lot like searching Wikipedia for something similar, where you would find a list, albeit this is much more detailed that Wikipedia is usually in such lists. I can see this being a very useful feature in the future.

Google is also launching a new mobile version that will help streamline the search process for those of us that always seem to be searching from our smartphones.

Google is always on the cutting edge, or close behind it when it comes to new technology and features for it’s services. Google has done a great job with these revisions and I can not wait to start using them myself, make sure you check them out as soon as you can. Start by Googling it!

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