New Google Search feature confesses when it drops the ball

Google Search is often pretty helpful and accurate – there's a reason it came to be absolutely dominant in the search engine space, after all – but sometimes, even Google doesn't get it right. There are times when searches don't turn up anything that's useful, and though Google does have some tools to help in those instances, sometimes people still wind up going through pages of search results without finding anything that matches what they were looking for.

Today, Google is rolling out a new feature in Google Search that will help with just that issue. When you perform a search that doesn't turn up much of anything useful, Google will now show a new message at the top of your results that alerts you to that fact.

While this won't necessarily help you refine your search, it will help you know when you're barking up the wrong tree (so to speak). When Google can, it'll offer up similar searches to try instead. It'll also show a link to tips on how to improve your searches when you use Google.

So, essentially, this feature exists to let you know when Google failed to do its job, which certainly seems a bit strange on the surface. Still, Google says that it's rolling out this feature in an attempt to save people some time, because most of us probably know how frustrating and time consuming it can be to look through search results that aren't quite hitting the mark.

Google's hope, of course, is that you don't see this alert all that often, but at the end of the day, it's nice that Google is going to be straightforward about the fact that it probably didn't find what you were looking for. Keep an eye out for this new Search feature, which is rolling out today in the US.