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.

For Diggnation and Twitterers everywhere, last week was a time to rejoice. Digg launched the DiggBar to rave reviews that claimed it exponentially simplified the task of submitting new stories and comments (excuse the slight exaggeration). By all accounts, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread (and the overused cliché). Popular technology news blog TechCrunch featured the story “DiggBar Keeps All Digg Homepage Traffic on Digg,” applauding the “brilliant move by Digg” and suggesting the Twitter crowd already loves it.

There are two disturbing realities to TechCrunch’s praise. First, they are correct: It is a smart move by Digg, but at the expense of all sites that are now linked with the short Digg URL. You see, Digg now cleverly and unobtrusively wraps all content of other sites within an iFrame, keeping viewers on Digg.com as opposed to the source of the original content. Without getting too technical, Digg is essentially cheating its way to increased traffic and ad revenue by keeping any content linked with the DiggBar and the short Digg URL within the Digg domain. As a consequence, the source link is replaced with the short Digg URL, which kills the Google ranking of the source site (no link juice) and passes on all the credit to Digg. Secondly, without this knowledge, many will be quick to adopt what is a convenient method of linking stories, as TechCrunch alludes. With the explosive growth of Twitter, this is a dangerous proposition: The spread of the short Digg URL could cause a decline in original source content links everywhere. All the while, Digg profits from the associated surge in traffic and ranking.

Additionally, what TechCrunch fails to mention is that the DiggBar also controls meta tags, filling in the meta description and keywords for the linked site with the default meta keywords “Digg, Digg.com, news, images, videos, vote, content.” Ultimately, this hurts the source site’s SEO, although meta tags aren’t as important for search engine optimization as they once were.

Seems a bit wrong, no? That’s because it is. Popular technology pundit John Gruber, writer of Daring Fireball, shares the sentiment and created a special version of his site for DiggBar users which offers some harsher words for Digg.

Boycott the DiggBar by doing the following:

1. Whenever you come across the DiggBar, promptly disable the toolbar by clicking the down arrow next to the large “X” on the right and activate “Always hide the toolbar.”

2. Whenever in need of a short URL, use one that employs the proper 301 redirect. Fortunately, there are a number of URL shortening services, namely bit.ly, tinyurl, is.gd, and piurl. My current favorite is is.gd which offers the shortest URLs I’ve seen for those in need of the extra characters for tweeting purposes. There happens to be a fantastic Firefox add-on that places its bookmark icon in your toolbar. It will shorten the URL of the page you’re currently viewing and place it on the clipboard so that you won’t have to navigate away from the page of interest. You can paste it wherever you’d like afterward.

3.  If you come across a short Digg URL, expand it to the source URL and if you need to shorten it, use one of the shortening services above.  This sounds like a pain but really it takes about five seconds.

4. If you are owner of a site, break out of the iFrame using JavaScript.