Google Search Just Keeps Getting Better

(MoneyWatch)  Google keeps inching closer to something approaching what you could call almost-real-time search by steadily iterating on its basic search product. In order to keep its most devoted users up to date with this constant set of changes, the company has also started a "This Week in Search" feature on its corporate blog.

The first one was posted on Friday by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience. She writes that over the past week, Google integrated a "Hot Trends" graph on its results page. Google Trends has been a useful tool for content producers for a few years now, because it provides data about the online zeitgeist in ways that can help you make choices about which content to display prominently.

But even Google faces a struggle to communicate just how these Trend features actually work: "The queries here are rather fleeting by nature -- one minute they're hot; the next, cold," wrote Mayer. Then she apologized if the example she cited -- "olympic bid" -- was no longer hot. (It wasn't.)

"The easiest way to be sure to see this feature is try one of the searches from our Hot Trends page. You'll see the hot trend featured at the bottom of the search results page, highlighted with a graph."

There have been a slew of other minor improvements to the search interface, including some "search option" tools, and a personalized search memory function, and some shopping aids. But by far the most significant change came a few weeks back when Google increased the size of the search field itself and the font size of the search terms displayed.

That is a reminder that when it comes to interface design changes, the simplest improvements are often the most effective.