22.Jul.2010 A practical example of Google’s ‘Updates Search’

Google has made some changes to their search pages and there has been some talk among bloggers and web development people about whether they are even relevant.

One of the changes is the introduction of the ‘Updates Search’.

This feature basically filters the organic search results and displays them, instead of in terms of a traditional ranking as defined by the Google algorithm, in chronological order, making the search results more like the real-time results you get if you used something like Twitter Search on a particular topic or set of keywords.

So how is this relevant?

Today, there was a glitch in the editing system of Facebook Pages. As it would happen, today is the day that I had planned updates on about 5 or 6 of my clients’ Facebook Pages so it was very frustrating. Even more frustrating, was the fact that Facebook hadn’t told the world anything of the glitch as they presumably scrambled to fix it.

So I turned to Google, and in particular the Updates Search within Google. Searching for the phrase “cant edit facebook pages” returned this result:

So, while it didn’t do much to relieve my frustration, at least I knew I wasn’t the only one unable to edit the pages.

The problem has since been resolved this afternoon and I have been able to do the updates on the Facebook Pages as I had planned for today.

The other ways you can now search for things on Google apart from Updates include discussions, images, maps and videos (which have been there for ages) and news, books and blogs.

Do you regularly use any of these search filters and if so, how? Please let us know in the comments. You don’t have to sign up or join anything to comment, just leave your comment below and it will appear on the post straight away.