A little while back, Google discretely introduced a “Show Options” tab that lets you filter your results by media, time or in other interesting ways. Filters are not new, but combined with Google’s awesome search, have become quite useful to me.

Filtering by Visited Pages. Google is being used more and more as a navigational device towards content you already know. Google is good, but if you’re deep in research sometimes it’s hard to find that site again, and this is a brilliant tool for this purpose. 

This behaviour is not uncommon, and an interesting trend I don’t feel is getting enough attention. Search has become less and less about discovery, and more about meeting basic usability requirements about finding existing content... Something search marketers are adjusting for. How often do you already know exactly what content you are looking for before you search? What chance do the other sites have of capturing your click for that impression? if you’re a search marketer, how do you adjust your optimisation metrics to cater for navigational search and usability from something traditionally focused on acquisition?

Here is my search for Domain names. I searched for this last week and couldn’t remember the name of the site which I decided was the way to go. 

Another feature in the options is the wonder wheel – we haven’t seen a lot of people using this from our analytics data, and I am thinking it probably would be more useful for internal search where you have a more defined content set. There are some implications for search, and with adoption will come more users entering your site via more specific keywords and the reduction in broad search terms.

We’ll be interested to see adoption rates of these filters  and any considerations for search marketing – we’re monitoring our logs and see about 5% of visits contain at least 1 filter, and will be looking to use this data in the future to enrich insights around keywords and what users are looking for when they use them.