Internet Dumper

Google continues to work to address the threat posed by the real-time search capabilities of services like Twitter and Facebook.

In May, they launched “Search Options” to allow users to refine search results by content type and time (within the past day was the timeliest you could get), but today, they’re launching a “past hour” filter to make its index even fresher.

Along with this key update, Google is rolling out 8 other search options which should be available to everyone at some point today. Those include the ability to search within a specific date range, shopping site filters, a visited pages filter, and an option to see only results from Google’s book, blog, and news search tools.





The “past hour” filter is certainly the most interesting addition, though. While Google offers other timely ways to get information – Google News and Google Trends being atop that list – the vast majority of users simply turn to its search engine.
By giving users the option to filter results from the past hour, they’ll see more current news and information as opposed to the WikipediaWikipedia entries and other high ranking content that dominate the top of many results in regular search. Earlier this week, GoogleGoogle also added “hot trends” to search results, a move that might portend TwitterTwitter-like trending topics being integrated throughout at some point down the road.
Google is playing catch up here – not in the sense of market share, but in the sense of making their results as timely as those found on social media sites. To see how they’re doing, we’ll need to put the “past hour” filter to the test next time there is a major current event breaking. Stay tuned.