Google has devised new ways for its millions of users to narrow their search results to help them find what they are looking for.

The search giant, which dominates internet search in Britain and much of the world, will allow people to use search "options" to slice and dice the results available from the web.

When any user inputs search terms into the search box, at the top of the page above the traditional blue links to webpages, there will be a "show options" link.

This will open a variety of new ways to focus the search – by category such as only videos or only reviews (for a restaurant or product search, for instance) or by time.

Users can look for results within the last 24 hours, or even pull up a timeline of results. There is also a "related searches" option which suggests other possibilities and a new feature called the "Wonder Wheel" which graphically shows users how related topics are clustered together.

Marissa Meyer, vice president of search products at Google, said that the company wanted to improve its understanding of what searchers were looking for. The company was proud of its search engine but realised that there was still a long way to go before it delivered perfect results to every user.

The new set of features allowed users to "build the query from the ground up" beyond the traditional results page, she said. The search options features were being made available immediately.

Other products were also previewed at an event called Searchology at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

A feature called "rich snippets" is aimed at giving users more information about the content of suggested website links. The snippet is the set of information included under each link in the results page and Google will now add more than just the traditional preview text. For a restaurant review, the rich snippet might contain the numbers of stars in a review and the restaurant's price range, for example.

"Google Squared" will present results in a format similar to a spreadsheet, pulling data from other websites and assembling it into columns and rows. For instance, enter "hotels in New York" and Google Squared will be able to provide comparative tables on cost, distance from a particular landmark and other information.

Google Squared may provoke controversy as it could give people less reason to click away from Google. If that happens, Google may face even more complaints about how it makes money from content created by other companies and publishers.

Ms Meyer said that the results in Google Squared clearly credited the sources for the data and could direct users to them.

Ms Mayer said that Google was only just beginning to solve some of the most difficult problems in search. She added that search was a "90-10 problem" and that the last 10 per cent of the problem – providing the exact information to users in the mode they want it – was the vast majority of the work. "The race in search is still far from over," she said.