Google’s ‘universal search’ – the logical next step

A subtle homepage redesign that gives more prominence to Google’s greatly expanded range of products and services, along with an improved set of results from the US Google.com search engine called ‘Universal Search’ ensures Google’s lead as the most accurate and relevant search engine is undiminished.

This is despite some commentators believing Google’s better search results aren’t in Google’s or users best interests, but clearly, information resides in more than just HTML web pages, but also in scanned books, blogs, video clips, news stories and more.

Being able to access this on one page of results gives you more – and better – information on the topic at hand. It helps you find information more easily, because it has brought you what should be relevant information that you didn’t even ask for, such as images or videos or blog entries or news stories, all of which could hold the answer to what you want to know.

Google say their vision for universal search is to “ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for”, beginning today, with more categories of search results to be added in the future in the new single set of results that Google is offering its users.

Google’s Veep of search products and user experience, Marissa Meyer, said that: “Our focus has always been making our users' search experience as simple and straightforward as possible. The ultimate goal of universal search is to break down the silos of information that exist on the web and provide the very best answer every time a user enters a query. While we still have a long way to go, today's announcements are a big step in that direction.”

As Meyer implies, it’s basically still a version 1.0 product. Google promise it will get much better, but have offered some examples of how it works right now. Have a look at the search results for Steve Jobs, Darth Vader and Nosferatu. In the Nosferatu results, you’ll see a link to the movie. Click the little + sign, and the video window will open up right there in the Google results pages. Steve Jobs and Darth Vader brings up images from the Google Images search engine along with other useful information.

The results aren't totally consistent yet – you can type in names of other famous people and not get the Google Images results, for example. But it’s version 1.0, and Google promise they’re working on making it better and better. They even foreshadow that new types of ads might appear on the right hand side of the page, such as video ads. But that’s still to come in the future.

Even though it’s a great idea, Google aren’t the first to offer these kinds of results. Yahoo said they have been offering something similar in Europe for two years, and anyone who’s tried out Yahoo Mobile search on their mobile cell phone will have noticed that different categories of results are offered up in the results, as the aim was to bring the most relevant information from different categories right to your cell phone screen, making cell phone based search more useful.

But what is new is Google’s way of grouping all of this information together. A blog entry at Google’s official blog explains how difficult getting the right and relevant results together from Google’s different search engines. Google also say that they are “in the process of deploying a new technical infrastructure that will enable the search engine to handle the computationally intensive tasks required to produce universal search results”.

In addition, Google is upgrading their ranking mechanism once more to cope with the added information, which “automatically and objectively compares different types of information”, with Google’s “search results ranked automatically by algorithms to deliver the best results to users anywhere in the world”.

Udi Manber, Veep of engineering at Google, said that: “Google has continued to concentrate on improving the quality of search. The level and speed of search innovation at Google has increased. Most of this innovation addresses basic ranking algorithms and is often not obvious to users. Users just see more accurate results, more often, in more languages, which is our primary goal.”

It’s great to see Google is finally able to accurately aggregate search results from different parts of the Google empire into a single page, while still making the original interfaces for different Google search products still separately available, and no doubt this is something that all competitors will try emulating in their own search results over the coming days, weeks and months.

Finally, Google have unleashed a new version of Google Experimental, available from Google Labs. Google said the site “provides users an opportunity to try out some of the latest search experiments and innovations and provide Google with feedback”.

Google says that one of the first experiments to be featured on the site “enables users to view their search results on a map or timeline. For instance, when someone searches for "Albert Einstein" on Google Experimental, they can choose to view the search results on a map that shows locations mentioned within web pages about Albert Einstein or on a timeline that illustrates the history of Albert Einstein's life”.
Source : http://www.itwire.com.au