Refining results in Google
May 11th, 2006 Further to my previous post about Google’s related results, I see that Google has an option to refine your results for some queries.
This is like the faceted search that we offer for our site search (for example search for gift sets on Ulta and we offer 7 different types of refinement). Clicking on one of the refine options will restrict the results that you see. In order to provide these refinement options Google needs to have some structured information about the pages its indexing. For example it needs to know whether a page is for patients or for health professionals. Google appears to have labelled a bunch of pages. You can see this when you click on one of the refinement options:
Presumably Google is somehow automatically categorizing these pages - they are against manually doing this type of thing. I’ve only seen the refine option for health related queries - e.g. hypertension. I presume this is part of the rumored Google Health.
I like this feature - it is fairly unobtrusive, and easy to use. I think related search terms would compliment this nicely. They could be shown for queries that don’t return results with structured data.
As a side note - internet explorer crashed twice while I was viewing these pages.
Thanks to Paul Denhup from Gartner for pointing this out
