Google: Putting the mental in experimental

Google released a strong new feature to their arsenal called Experimental Search. What exactly is an “Experimental Search”? It’s an exploratory new feature that Google has released that you can join, provided you have a Google account (Currently you can only use one account at a time, but hopefully the application will expand to allow the use of multiple accounts, at some point,) that allow you to use some much wanted features that have been added to Google.com.

The new features that Google has allowed people to test are keyboard shortcuts, SearchWiki with sound, Accessible View, and Social Search. These are huge. I tested out keyboard shortcuts and I am absolutely floored. Why? Google.com has become a standard in my searching career. With features like “The Wonder Wheel” for blogging and searching for information, it makes it impossible to conceive of switching to another search engine. Keyboard shortcuts will allow you to google your term, hit the shortcuts, slam the enter key, and then go on with learning, or finding what you needed to, without the extra mouse movements that you needed before.

Here are the keyboard shortcuts:

• J Selects the next result.
• K Selects the previous result.
  
• O Opens the selected result.
  
• <Enter> Opens the selected result.
  
• / Puts the cursor in the search box.
  
• <Esc> Removes the cursor from the search box.

Google has raised the bar and made “googling or searching” a social activity. Another notable feature is Social Search. It will be very interesting to see where Social Search goes in the future, as there is great potential in this feature. Example: If you’re a developer and you are buddies with other developers, you can see what they search and find great resources, helpful tips, and even snippets that you can take with you to apply to other projects.

Definition of Social Search:

More easily find relevant blogs, reviews and other public content from your social circle. Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called “Results from people in your social circle.”

What is your social circle? It’s a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Learn more about Social Search.

Conclusion:

With Google’s recent release of Wave, the Droid launch approaching fast, rolling out experimental features, a Gmail push app for iPhone, and other features like Voice, it seems hard to think that Google wouldn’t continue to set the standard for what a search engine can do for you. Google has really put in some development time to make their products “awesome,” and most are free for anyone to try and use. I think that Google could revolutionize the search engine again with these extra features. Google has definitely made their presence felt again (as if you forgot them,) so try bingin‘ that when you get the chance.

Note: Thanks to @thadwillnotstop for the tip!