Thanks to active Twitterpaters @johnbattelle and @thepartycow, you can read about some new options Google is testing at "Google Blogoscoped". The post includes screenshots, and a link to this YouTube video of the options in action.

Here's a summary:

What happens is that on the search results, say for the query comic books, a link in the top blue bar will read “Show options...”. Click it, and a side bar full of options expands to the left. The options include some known experiments, plus things I didn’t see so far. There are restriction options to show only recent results, only videos, only forum entries, or only reviews. You can sort by relevance, or by date, and you can only show results from time ranges like the past 24 hours or the past week. You can opt to receive longer snippet text, and images. There’s also a timeline feature and search suggestions.

Basically, you can limit your results to things like videos, forum posts, etc. But for all the time Google spends on indexing and cross-referencing text, I wonder if they are coming up with a plan to address the "semantic web". Text is a container for meaning, and there are many people working on this conflict, which would obviate some of Google's technology. If you'd like to learn more, here's a primer on the semantic web.

In the nearly six years that I've been operating the BananaSlug search engine, I've tried to explain why you'd want to mess with Google's obviously finely-honed search results. When your Google search returns tens of thousands of pages, you need a dose serendipity to dip into the long tail of results and see some pages that include your search term but you would otherwise overlook.

This leads me to this blog post that does a great job telling the BananaSlug story, along with how this particular searcher found it useful and entertaining.

I asked a marketing colleague the other day if she uses Twitter, and she responded that she really didn’t have the time and besides, who’s interested in what she had for lunch?

I asked the wrong question, which should have been, “Do your customers use Twitter?" A  quick search showed that they do, and in the last few hours they had provided some interesting insights about her brand.

One conceptual stumbling block about Twitter is the “Why do people care what I’m doing every given second?” question, but that has two answers.  One is to stop thinking about Twitter in terms of you and what you are doing, but as mother lode of what other people are doing and thinking, starting at any point in time and moving back as long as Twitter has been saving their tweets.  If you aren’t sure what Twitter is, don’t start by tweeting your own comments, or even by following the tweets of any one person. Start at http://search.twitter.com and look up something about your industry, company or product. If it is a real timely topic, you’ll actually see the tweets scrolling by. Twitter also has links to trending topics, so you can see what lots of people are talking about right now.   You can do all this without even setting up a Twitter account. Once you understand how the search feature works, you can incorporate it into your standard marketing intelligence playbook, along with things like Google Alerts. One insightful marketer uses Twitter to develop personas that characterize their customers.   If you use an RSS reader, save your searches and check them periodically.

Of course, once you’ve passively used Twitter, you can get an account and start following people who you find during your searches that are contributing content that’s interesting or relevant to you. And, finally, you can start tweeting about things yourself, that roll up into the voice of the crowd. That's the second answer.

Who’s interested in what you had for lunch?  You’d be surprised.

When explaining the power of microblogging (e.g. Twitter) to others, it helps to share my own occasional "Aha!" moments.

On Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that an economic stabilization bill had been written and was available at financialservices.house.gov. I tried going there for about 10 minutes, but the servers were swamped.

So I went to Twitter search, and merely searched for "bill". The immediate results included several comments about the bill, and at least two links to download it from non-swamped servers. This tells me a couple things: I trusted in the critical mass of contributions to Twitter that I would find what I wanted - and sure enough, it was there. It also shows the power of searching the immediate NOW.

A Google search for "bill" includes a 5-hour old news link, imdb's of movies like "Bill" and "Kill Bill" and wikipedia entries on Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. But for the moment I was searching for "bill" on Twitter, there was only one "bill" that mattered most.

This is how Twitter brings together the massive amounts of information being fed it NOW with what I am searching for NOW. This is just one way Twitter works, if you know how to use it.