Google appear to have added a few more search criteria to their UI. Amongst these new options are forum and review search. The UI looks a lot more like Google Blog Search where you are able to search posts from the past 24 hours, past week, past year etc. So this is a sign Google are moving towards real-time search along with the added value of conversation search.

This will be another great addtion to the many brand monitoring tools out there. There are currently quite a few forum search engines, such as BoardReader and Omgili, but it is very interesting to see Google move into it. First looks show that it is quite comprehensive, although there doesn’t seem to be the opportunity to create trend graphs like you can do with Omgili Buzz Graphs.

Google have also added review search. In the past, there haven’t been many tools that let you specifically search reviews. I had bodged together a consumer review search on Google Custom Search a while ago, it searches all the consumer review sites I know of, but Google’s new filter appears to search both ‘professional’ and consumer reviews.

This is all very interesting stuff that gives an insight into where Google are going with search – showing they recognise the importance of social search and being able to search what people are saying.

Top marks to bigmouth Andy Travers for pointing this out.