One of Google’s biggest reasons for success is that it has able to redefine search during a time when everybody thought that search is a solved problem. It is therefore not surprising to know that the search company is continuously finding ways to improve search technology and the user search experience.

Google in 1999

Google Today

To test new search experience designs, Google is known to have made “random” testing on users using the main Google.com homepage. This is why there were times when some people were able to see upcoming changes to the Google search interface before everybody else. Because of Google’s popularity though, it’s not uncommon to see hacks that lets people see these “experimental” features. Obviously, there’s a keen interest by many people to peak on the innovations that the search giant is brewing. This is where Google’s Experiments comes in.

Google Experimental is a project that lets users try out many of the new features being developed by Google to improve the search experience without doing any hacks. Not even Google can ignore this “demand” by its users to become volunteer guinea pigs.

The basic of Google Experimental is like this: There are many different experimental features that you can try to see what it’s about. If you like what that experimental feature does, then you can opt to “join” that experiment and make it a semi-permanent feature of your main Google search experience. You’re only allowed to join one experiment at a time, but this is not tied to your Google account, but rather to your cookie settings. This means that you can join different experiments on different computers, and any user that uses Google on a particular computer will still see the experimental feature regardless of his or her Google account.

Currently there are four “experiments” that you can try out:

Alternate Views for Search Results
This experiment allows users see alternative ways of presenting search results: the default list view, time line view, map view, and the new info view.

Time line shows results in a time line, with a bar graph on top of the results showing the approximate mapping of volume of results to a particular year. Timeline lets you view search results in a time-based context (for example this iPhone search in timeline view clearly illustrates the fact that there’s a peak on the volume of indexed documents around the time when it was announced, and around the month when it was launched)

Click on the image for a larger view

The map view extracts location information from the search results and appropriately locates them on the Google map. Each search items are represented as place marks on the map with an index on the left hand side.

Info View is the latest addition to the alternate views. What this does is it shows and highlights alternate information on the search snippet (this is the snippet of text that you see on search results items that usually gives you an idea on what that particular search result is about) the default shows your search keywords, but you can also show dates, measurements, locations and images.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The Keyboard shortcuts experiment conveniently adds a set of keyboard keys that lets you navigate around the search results easily. J and K selects the next and previous results respectively, O and opens up the selected result, / puts the cursor in the search box, and removes it.

Left Hand Search Navigation

This alternate view lets you search deeper in a particular type of content—patents, products or news or other content types. The left hand search navigation also allows you to refine your results by providing related searches.

Right Hand Contextual Search Navigation

The right hand contextual search navigation is similar to the previous feature, but puts the navigation link on the right side of the page instead of the left.

If you’re the type who likes to try on new stuff on Google, the Google Experimental page provides a good place for you to play around with Google’s latest UI developments. For some, these experimental features will become useful regular features that they’ll use in their day to day use of Google.