Now available are additional search options that allow you to filter by video, forums, reviews and perhaps more importantly by time. Google is trying to duplicate Twitter’s ability to tap into live data to spread news faster than any other media outlet by allowing for filterable results by the past day, week or year. Although not quite up-to-the minute like Twitter, it’s close and will surely only get better. Additionally, Google has added the ability to change the format of results. You can now see images associated with a page link, more text or related searches. In an attempt to become more visual, the Wonder Wheel provides nodes related to your query, which you can click through to continually narrow your search or jump to a tangentially related search. Also, the timeline view gives a history behind your related search, which can be narrowed to any given month of any given year.

But the real potential Wolfram|Alpha killer is Google Squared, scheduled to launch by the end of May. Head over to Techcrunch to see it in action. Essentially it will construct a database of factual information based on your search organized into what Google labels “squares” aka an Excel spreadsheet. Eventually, each column will be filterable. The new feature does have issues with some searches. For example, in Techcrunch’s exclusive video, the search term “spaceships” returns links to a Corvette and a missile carrier.

But more importantly, Squared will parse data from the entire Web, pulling what it believes to be factual data from pages and organizing it in an easily navigable manner. Wolfram|Alpha will depend solely on its own databases, which house a measly 10 terabytes of data. So while Wolfram|Alpha focuses on separating what it believes to be the best information into a separate database to process results, Google is taking advantage of the vastly more amount of information on the Web to compile its answers to your search.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out. Based on the preliminary data, it seems Wolfram|Alpha will still serve a niche role at this point, but Google doesn’t seem too keen on allowing it to coexist.