Google is testing a new user interface for its search options feature. If you are unfamiliar with the search options feature, it is the link on your search results page that says "show options" and brings up a menu on the left-hand side of the screen providing a number of ways to filter your results.
In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this.
Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."
Update 2: Matt Cutts gave WebProNews another exclusive interview, in which he gave some more details about Caffeine (among other things. It's only hitting one data center before the holidays, and it isn't even live quite yet. Google will roll it out to more data centers in January.
Yahoo has given Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers the ability to have their ads shown in filtered searches. When Yahoo launched its new search results pages last month, they added the ability for users to filter results by site. Relevant ads are now appearing with these results.
Google has added an option to quickly view PDF documents in your browser from search results, while keeping formatting intact. This comes in the form of a simple "Quick View" link located in the search result snippet for PDF results.
We often take for granted the results we get for any given web search. When we search, we expect to find what we are looking for. That's the way it should be. The average user doesn't normally consider what it takes for a search engine to deliver those results, but there are so many factors at play, working behind the scenes and coming together to (hopefully) deliver the user the information they seek.
Earlier this year, Google launched its search options feature. This is a clickable link on search results pages, which provides a list of options to let you refine your search by a number of different parameters.
There is a scam going on inside of Google search results called Google Cash, aka: Google Money Tree, aka: Google Treasure Chest. This is where alleged scammers misrepresent themselves as being affiliated with Google, and advertise a low-cast kit, which would enable people to make money.
Microsoft is working on a new feature for Bing called "Bing and Ping." This is a means to share your search results with friends. Bing's "decision engine" nature provides plenty of content that users may actually want to share. Nicholas Kerr of the Bing Team explains:
Update: Digg shared some more details about how its search feature (relaunched earlier this year) works. Sammy on the company blog says:
" We’re using Apache SOLR/Lucene which helped us scale horizontally and solved many of our relevancy issues as well as enabling discovery of new content through facets. Beyond site search, the rich set of features has allowed us build a platform that enables other features such as Related By Source and Related By Keywords."