What did Google spider today?

The other day a friend of mine told me about a new tool from Google called the “Wonder wheel”.

What is does is this: When you type in a search term in Google, on the top of the results page, there is a link that says “Show Options” and on the left navigation, at the bottom, there’s a link that says “Wonder Wheel”.

This new tool will bring up related keywords to the keyword you are searching for and organize them in a very cool ajax graph. Each hub of the wheel is clickable so you can drill down further and further for long tail related keywords.

It’s a great way to get additional related keywords perhaps because Google is telling you exactly what THEY think are related keywords.

It is a pretty neat way to search for related keywords. Sure it’s slower than some other ways, but a lot more fun.

Now there is all sorts of cool stuff inside “show options” menu. But one of my favorites is how you can learn to get insights about how and when the Google crawls your site (or your competitors) with the date range in show options.

Because it turns out the new Google “search options” can be used with “site:” command to find recently crawled pages!

Here’s an example of a site owned by Google expert Andy Edmonds. In the screen shot you can clearly see by using the “site:” command with the domain name, Google will show you exactly when they crawled your site and added new pages to their index.

New Google Search Options

Do you think that might be helpful to know when Google is crawling your site and adding your pages to the index? You bet!

But it get’s even better because you can also use this tool on other peoples sites too – like maybe your competitors?!