Google announced exciting new features at its annual Searchology event at the Googleplex headquarters today, where the company's executives argued that “understanding people, health, communication, education and knowledge” is the next frontier of search.

The Mountain View-based company introduced tools known as Google Search Options, Google Squared, and Rich Snippets.

Search Options, which goes live today, aims to figure out what the user intent is and get the results quickly. The user can filter their results based on factors like timeliness, result type such as image or videos, or a desire to see search results in visual form.

“Search options is a further way to give users the power to customize the way they use Google,” said Juergen Galler, director of product management at Google.

“We’re always thinking about what we can do to improve the search experience, and we think this launch is a good step to help users get quickly and easily to precisely the kind of information they seek.”

Google's VP of search products, Marissa Mayer, says the Mountain View company is focusing on letting people slice and dice their search results.

Executives also discussed Google Squared, that creates tables of numerical data culled from searches of websites.

Another way search results may be displayed is in a Wonder Wheel layout which displays content like a wheel graphic that gives the user additional search terms and paths to get more specific information users may or may not have thought about.

Wonder Wheel can be found in the left column of searches as a clickable option.

This is somewhat similar to Wolfram Alpha, a new computational knowledge engine that will be launched on May 18. Wolfram Alpha uses a natural language search engine which focuses on answering fact based questions.

Google