On October 1st 2009 Google introduced new Search options that you can see by clicking the Show options… link just below the Search bar.

There are nine new search options that can be used to filter search results. These include Past hour, date filters e.g. Past week, Shopping sites, Visited pages, Not yet visited, Books, Blogs and News.

I’ll show you how it works. We posted an article about Business Network (SW) on The National Pages Business Directory.

A Search for “Networking Groups Taunton” shows a link to the Business Network (SW) Gold Profile on www.thenationalpages.co.uk in position 3 on Google Page 1 as shown here:

Search "Networking Groups Taunton"

If you click on the new Show Options checkbox (just below the Search Keywords) you will see the search filters on the left.

This provides you a useful tool to find recent items (links to new webpages) that you may not have seen before.

The image below is from a click on Past hour. As you can see Google has indexed an article on Business Network (SW) we posted only 5 minutes beforehand where it says 5 minutes ago.

Display web pages indexed in Past Hour

Of course, how frequently Google indexes new articles is based on many criteria. In our case, Google indexes updates to our site frequently.

The new search filters are very useful to narrow down your searches especially to find recent articles, or restrict the search to Books, Blogs and News sites.

Nigel Finch, The National Pages