By pete -

LifeHacker gives a nice rundown of the new Google Search Options:

Google‘s honchos unveiled the new “Search Options” at a Searchology event, one that coincides with the two year anniversary of the Universal Search unveiling that put brief looks at images, news, and other Google-powered search results on the main page. The new Search Options, along with richer “snippets” underneath results that can show reviews and specially-formatted information, should start showing up for most users immediately, but further down the line are more interesting experiments.

Handy Youtube vid from Google, explaining the new features:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtirDMfcOKE[/youtube]

Along with these new options comes talk of Google Squared – which will appear in Google Labs this month. Google’s VP of Search Products notes:

Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic – instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We’ll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.

Google Squared sure sounds like a another blow to the coming release of WolframAlpha. Google’s first strike on that was their Public Data in Search Results.

More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event [Official Google Blog]