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Google's unveiled the technologies it hopes will make sure it stays everyone's favourite search engine at what it's calling its first "state of the union" address. Amongst the announcements at the event, dubbed "Searchology," the Californian company outlined plans to let users "slice and dice" their search results - but didn't want to reveal too much. "I think we can open the kimono a little bit without talking about the computer science behind it," said Google's Marissa Mayer, scandalously.

So what are the shiny new features we'll be seeing in The Google Of Tomorrow? First up: Rich Snippets. What that means is that if you look up, say, a review of a restaurant or hotel then you'll get a "snippet" of information telling you its average review score and how many people have reviewed it (i.e. like when you use Google's existing Shopping function, formerly known as Froogle). The down side is that Rich Snippets depends on website makers formatting their pages in a certain way, so it could take a while to take off.

Next up: Google Squared – which seems to have been inspired by Compare the Meerkat adverts. What this feature will do is trawl the web for the data you're after and put it into a spreadsheet for you. The Google demo searched for "small dog" and then brought up a simple table showing different dogs, their origin, weight and height. Ms. Mayer, Google's vice-president of search products, says it'll allow you to achieve in "split seconds" what would have otherwise taken someone half a day (unless they wanted to compare Meerkats).

And then there's Search Options – for slicing and dicing. The Mountain View firm says the feature will let users "refine, filter and view results in a different way." What that means is that you'll be able to apply filters to results of an ordinary Google search according to pre-set genres – allowing you to isolate, for example, product reviews or forum posts that match your search query. Search Options will also let you mix text and image search results more easily.

Google's still streets ahead with its current search engine – and wants to stay that way. It's currently behind 63 per cent of all searches in the United States, for example, with Yahoo lagging behind in second place with 20 per cent. "I've said this many times but search is still in its infancy," said Ms. Mayer. "Our engineers are worried about what is the next big thing in search and how are they going to find it."