Google gets fresh as search race heats up

Google gets fresh as search race heats up. Google has rolled out search engine refinements as Microsoft strives to lure people to Bing and Twitter heightens appetites for real-time updates and news.

Google modifications include tools that let people limit online searches to only serve up results from the past hour, or by specific date ranges.

"This can be particularly helpful when you're looking for the freshest information," Google engineer Patrick Riley and product manager Nundu Janakiram said in a blog post.

"Or, if you have some idea of when the information you're looking for may have been published to the web."

Site selection

Google users can choose to be shown search only results from blogs, news, or web pages that they have visited or those they haven't visited.

"This can be particularly helpful when you're researching something you've already explored and you want to return right where you left off," Google said.

"To use this option you'll need to be signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled."

A new tool also modifies searches to include more or fewer shopping websites depending on how interested people are in commercial pitches online.

Google put the features in a Search Options side panel it added to search results pages in May. To access the new tools, one clicks on a "show options" link displayed above search results.

Bing's 'decision engine'

The Bing search engine Microsoft launched in May was designed to intuitively understand what people are seeking online and challenge Google.

The US software colossus described Bing as a "Decision Engine" aimed at online shoppers trying to make buying decisions, plan trips, research health matters, or find local businesses.

Bing posted a slight increase in its share of the US search market in August, the third month in a row of modest gains, according to online tracking firm comScore.

Bing increased its market share to 9.3 per cent in August from 8.9 per cent in July and 8.4 per cent in June, comScore said.

Google remained the overwhelming leader of the lucrative US search and advertising market in August with a 64.6 per cent market share, a dip of 0.1 per cent from July. Yahoo!'s share was unchanged at 19.3 per cent in August.

New partnerships

Yahoo and Microsoft, after months of negotiations, unveiled a 10-year web search and advertising partnership in late July that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google.

Under the agreement, Yahoo will use Microsoft's search engine on its own sites while Yahoo will provide the exclusive global sales force for premium advertisers.

Microsoft is also integrating messages from prominent Twitter users into results generated by Bing.

Twitter is seen by some technology analysts as the next frontier in the field of web search because of the real-time nature of the messages from its users.

Twitter's real-time stream of messages of 140-character-or-less is not currently searchable on Google.

Microsoft said its efforts with Bing and Twitter were "an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results." / news.com.au