It is a challenge that the search engines do face – trying to keep their interfaces as streamlined as possible to avoid clutter, confusion, and complexity. But they also seem to want to expand in a way that they can offer assistance and help to searchers when it seems like that help might be need. That can come in the form of query suggestions that they might include with search results.

It’s more likely that someone would use a query suggestion rather than an advanced search operator like a “label:” in front of an additional word in a query. As an observer, it’s interesting to watch and see what Google might do to make it easier for searchers to find what they are looking for while simultaneously avoiding “messy” search interfaces.

I think so as well – instead of additional searches, we might start seeing some options to refine results in intelligent ways.

Those are good points. Instead of people using a “label” type search operator, the search engine might instead offer those labels at the tops of search results based upon annotations made by others, categories determined by the search engine, and in other ways a well.

For example, you can use a “define” search operator to get a definition of something, such as “define:entropy”, but if your query is “what is entropy” (without the quotation marks), Google shows you a definition at the top of the search results. Likewise, the people at Google may try to find a way to offer labels to searchers without requiring them to use the “label” search operator.

Thank you. I suspect that the percentage of people who use advanced search operators as search tools (rather than to do something like check information about their own sites, or competitors sites, or to do keyword research), is rather small too.

I’m not sure if many searchers (who know about them) are really all that excited about doing an allinanchor or allintitle or allinurl type search to help them find information, or will start doing so in the future. If Google introduces the “label” search operator, will more and more people start using it? I don’t know if they will. I would think that Google would have to take some steps to help educate their users on how it could be helpful.