Two New Google Operators and Limited Google Clustering

A gentleman in India has blogged about what appears to be an undocumented Google special syntax called type.. I goofed around with it a little bit and while it's interesting, it may be for the end user the equivalent of the Machine That Goes Ping.

The syntax is type:keyword, where keyword is the thing for which you want to get a type. For example, if you do a search for type:washington, Google will return "Washington — Type: State" at the top of the page along with a citation URL. There does not appear to be a way for Google to express more than one type -- Washington the person, Washington the district, etc. I find this interesting but I'm not sure how I'd get use out of it, except perhaps for understanding what Google considers a particular noun/name/etc.

Meanwhile, a different gentleman has noticed that Google has begun offering limited clustering in some of its search results. (Oy, it's about time. What took them so long??!) A third gentleman has explored the resulting URL and found an operator called more that seems to narrow the context of a search.

I have yet to see the clustering behavior with any of my searches, so it may be somewhat limited at this point. Keep your eyes out for Refine Result options at the top of the Google search results page.

Posted to Search Engines-Google