Google Search’s search filters can be a useful tool when you research something on the Internet. They enable you to limit results, for instance so that only video, news or image results are displayed.
While Google won’t touch those major ones, it appears that the company has removed several “lesser” used filters of the “More” menu from its search engine.
When you click on the more link right now, you will notice that only four or five options remain, instead of the ten that were displayed previously.
Gone are for example blogs, discussions, recipes, patents or places. The remaining options may be shuffled around as well now, so that one entry that you found listed under more may now appear on the main bar directly based on your search query.
Users who have made use of the discussion filter on Google are complaining about the removal on Google’s
product forums.
So what does the discussion filter do? It limits search results to discussion forums mainly. If you perform a discussion search, you end up with a list of forum results only that you can go through. Other types of results, e.g. blog results, news sites or social sites, are filtered from the results.
The blog and places filters work in a similar fashion. They filter out all results but the desired one from search.