Google Blogoscoped posted a chunk of Javascript last week that unlocks a few experimental features in Google Search. The features are being pushed to a trial group, but the Javascript will add a cookie that allows anyone to participate.
I just got around to playing with the “Wonder Wheel” search view. It’s a small graphical application that provides tangential, semi-related topics for any search term. Searching for “science fiction” provides a link to “science fiction authors,” which links to “isaac asimov,” which links to “carl sagan,” for instance. Not shown in the photo above is that the complete search results are listed to the right. It’s not the sort of thing that helps refine a search, but it could come in handy for browsing through related topics.
Also worth checking out is a timeline view, which gives you an idea of the volume of published content for a particular search term over time. It’s well suited for digging up an old article with a common search term, filtering through the results by date.
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