The New Face of Google's Desktop Search

The"spring metamorphosis," as Google calls the changes to its search results page, displays"Universal Search," the"Search Options" panel and a technology built around "Google Squared" on the left-hand side of the page.

Universal Search locates the most relevant results for a user's search. The left-hand panel of the search results page now suggests the most relevant genres of results for a query at the top. Google is retaining the "everything" option, which integrates different types of results into the main results, but users can now further refine their results through the left-hand side of the page.

The"Search Options" panel, launched last spring, brought slice-and-dice tools to search, and these are now showcased on the left-hand side of the new search results page so users can get different views of their results.

"Google Squared," an experimental semantic search tool at Google Labs that takes a category and creates a starter "square" of information, is the basis for automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the Internet. The left-hand side of the new Google search results page has a "Something Different" feature, which is built on"Google Squared" technology.

The "Something Different" feature lets users find other topics related to their queries.