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Google Expands to 'Universal' Search
ppadala writes "Google today unveiled its uber search which allows you to search for text, images, news etc. together. This is the result of unifying various search engines that Google developed for web, images, news etc. Google's main page and the results page are also sporting a polished look with a top menu bar sporting various search items."
Say it ain't so!
Google's jumping the shark!
-Nick
"sporty" of them.
If I remember correctly, Yahoo's oneSearch already did this ? Except it doesn't seem to be available for regular search.
On the other hand, I've been playing around with the Alpha (Beta) search, which seems to be much cooler. But only available for australia (the cool interface must be due to their uber-cool office).
Heh, to put it mildlyQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I cannot go to Google Groups with single click (and still have web search option) from this site :s =org.mozilla:en-US:official
http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rl
Yeah, I got up this morning, and reopened my GMail tab after accidentally closing the thing...
I actually needed a double-take.
I was like, "Whoaaa."
Oh well, it's better than getting more spam.
Why is this news -- because it is Google? The whole article is filled with "Google understands blah blah...but all their competitors do too and have been doing the same thing".t man&form=QBRE
No hot grits, but you can see natalie portman images inlined in the search results in live.com and that has been there for a while now. http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=natalie+por
Directly from the article:
Google's competitors have also begun integrating results from their engines in various ways and with different approaches, but with the same goal in mind: improve the search experience for users.
Did nobody else notice the iGoogle link on the top right hand corner? Doesnt Apple have trademarks on anything starting with a small i?
**Life is too short to be serious**
is this your final form?
Where is this new search? Usually Google doesn't announce things till they are ready (well, or at least beta ;-). One of the things I've always like about Google is that it seldom builds up some product/vapourware before it's release. Is that policy going to end now?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Although everyone loves Google at the present time, it's still always puzzled me that people aren't working on a distributed search mechanism that could potentially be far more capable and powerful than Google.
After all, individual sites are far better placed to index their resources than a generic crawler can ever be, for a number of reasons. They have far more efficient access to their local data for starters, and are able to do the indexing instantaneously as things change. Individual sites are also able to apply semantic information since they know what their sites are actually about, whereas a generic engine cannot possibly know.
The sheer power available in a distributed search system would also be massively beyond anything that even the mighty Google could ever supply, for all the usual reasons associated with distribution and distributed computation.
Once you recurse more than a few levels down a parallel distributed search tree, the available processing power and bandwidth just go totally astronomic. What's more, simply limiting the degree of query recursion would allow you to tailor your desired results/time behaviour, and since the intelligent tagging at each site would contain hugely more semantic information than currently, you could direct your searches far more effectively too.
And it wouldn't be slower ether, because the distributed indexes are easily gathered by caching aggregators, and competition would no doubt provide plenty of those.
I know that several distributed search efforts do exist, but the point here is that they have virtually zero takeup, largely because of the dominance of Google and the general state of happiness with centralized search technology. While centralization works more or less OK for now, distribution has the potential to provide a vastly superior search system in ALL respects.
We really should be looking at it more seriously.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Can we have an URL? What is this Google thingy? ;)
I wonder if adding as many services as it has added as quickly as it has added and changing things as quickly as it has added has made a small nimble company bloatware. Moving from a clean interface to a cluttered feature-laden experience that does everything reminds me of a certain word processor tool that can now do calculations and publish to my blog. The next google iteration will have links to creating a blog entry on your search results, wikiing the results in your wiki, emailing the results, saving your search results to your calendar or creating an alert that will inform you if anyone ever submits any new items on the internet in this subject area including anything ever printed. Also a link to create a specialized google adwords entry using these words on your blog. I use google because its clean and simple. Don't change the main business appeal of your product.
It sures yields unexpected results Error: Bad Feed We're very sorry.
Gremlins have stolen our ram.
We sure will miss them.
We are having technical difficulties. We will rectify the problem very soon. Please try again shortly.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
You're forgetting about one humble factor: spam sites. What's in it to stop a spammer from getting a hundred of high-end servers [or better yet, from using his arsenal of infested Windows PCs], and throw their resources on building an index to match his own agenda?
I hate the way they've stuffed the options up into the top left hand corner. Now I have the drag the damn mouse up there, click on the link I want, then drag the damn mouse back to type in what I need.
Granted, the focus moves the search box but the search results page looks clumsy and is unintuitive.
Google, change it back. There's no shame in admitting you made a mistake.
Summation 2
The "polished menus" disappear if you have javascript disabled in your browser, which is annoying. I suspect that this interface change (compressing the tabs) is designed to clear up valuable real estate for ads.
Also, the fact that news/books/image/etc. results show up in unpredictable places, instead of in a designated area, makes it harder to quickly scan through web search results.
Perhaps the results page layout has been made intentionally unpredictable to condition users to read text in columns and places on the page other than the narrow web search results area. (To get more people to look at and click on ads instead of filtering them out as they review search results.)
I've been disappointed with the changes to the point that I have disabled all images from news.google.com & images.google.com, and I'm considering experimenting with competing search engines for the first time in years.
I for one welcome our new google overlords!
What's in it to stop a spammer from getting a hundred of high-end servers [or better yet, from using his arsenal of infested Windows PCs], and throw their resources on building an index to match his own agenda?
Nothing stops him, but he'd still be creating an index only for his own site. He'd be free to distort his own index to his heart's content of course, but it won't affect anyone else. It would only distort the information searchable on his own site.
You probably had in mind something like Majestic-12, which uses distributed computing to generate a centralized search engine. Yeah, that's a totally crap idea, and is indeed susceptible to the problem you mentioned because of its centralization. A proper distributed search engine wouldn't be like that, it would be distributed.
The parent mentioned aggregator caches as accelerators too, and you might think that spammers could distort the aggregators' cumulative indexes, but once again, no --- it's trivial to restrict the effect of an index to operating on its data source sites alone, much like one restricts Firefox to loading images only from the site of the current web page.
I do get videos "mixed in the normal results", but I can't watch *those* in-place. That only works on the "video" result page. Seems like combining that would have been a logical next step here...
I agree 100%. Google, change it back, please.
I only see the altered layout on the home page, but nothing universal about it? anyone got an exact link?
www.clusty.com I'm loving this search engine. Besides the big G I find its the only one worth trying. It is especially good when your search terms are ambiguous or have multiple meanings. For example "Web Service". That has a meeting and a connotation for developers, but a much more accepted connotation to the public at large... Clusty immediately separates these into nodes so you can focus on what you are looking for... Now if they only let you set up your own clusters (nodes) It would totally rock.
In addition to the tool bar being moved up to the top left, why is there no way to filter out the news, video, etc?
I just tried searching for "halo 3 beta" to get some info on it and a lot of blog and news results were being displayed inline. At times, I would like to just search the web with the ranked results, not the additional fluff. "-news" seemed to not remove the news article from being displayed first.
I use Google web services all the time. Lately, however, some of them are giving errors with "Please try again in 30 seconds" a lot.
seems to need work though. searching for boobies just returns a bunch of pics of seagulls.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
...'Universal' Search still can't find where you put your car keys.
All they are doing is exactly what they do now. Intergrate more results from images and news etc, into the main body of results. It seems like they are just announcing it for some press really and to point out they are going to keep doing it more and more as time goes by. Its probably being driven by the fact they have, for a while had now, no space above the search box for all the lab ideas going live, so this is the only way to neaten up the list and remove the clutter of search options so as to stop it becoming a jungle of "click here to search for X" links. An regarding some people saying when you click over to news or images to search and it clears your search terms, its not happening for me, works as before, but the links are moved into a grey bar above the search results.
... can it find my socks yet?
omgz it's teh web 2.0!
Do not mark in this space. For official office use only.
strange... why hasn't live.com adapted the changes yet?...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Ok, so I understand the concept behind this change. At least, in part I do. It's a reflection on web 2.0 hype - blogs and video being more popular.
However, somehow I think Google may be missing the point. I'm certain I can't be the only person who is finding less and less relevance with every search request I type. How does this change improve that state? If anything, as far as I can see, it's adding even more noise to drown out the signal.
Especially where blogs are concerned, my (wholly unscientific and subjective) impression is that at least 60% of all blogs are just SEO link farms (ironically, the majority of which are hosted by Blogger).
Web 2.0ish, but all style, gloss and less substance. So yes, very Web 2.0ish
I for one would like a search engine that will stop displaying darn e-commerce sites every time I try to find information on a topic. I can't count the number of times I'm looking for info on a particular part and have to wade through 50 sites trying to sell me said part. How about cutting down the universal a notch and giving me specifically the type of results I'm looking for?
... Is a bigger issue by far than this. I really liked that way better then NexTag for finding pricey stuff.
I think that with every reduction/reintrodution of their branded search itemization they lose a little stature. If I have to figure out that "Products" used to be Froogle then the user has to re-discover what they know is already there. Familiarity breeds success when you're talking eyeballs.
Not to go off topic, but reducing the stature of Froogle is no different than Yahoo jacking their site around and how I always used to use my personal page for TV listings. Since they went web 2.0 on that I haven't been back. How can you wreck a data-listing of upcoming TV shows. Yahoo does now, look at the forums sometime, lotta pissed off users. What used to take a quick glance is now 10 minutes of scrolling and refreshing the screen with more ads.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
I knew this guy who I used for my linux tutorials, he was a guru in all that is linux.
He worked for google in the early days, and told me how he helped them set up their early server rooms.....hundreds of thousands of older computers running in a clustered format on linux, to
do the searches of which you speak of.
They CAN expand to hold up proper time frames for searches with this new search, if it already isnt that powerful, but I have no doubt they have the power to do the searches inside a parallel distributed search tree, they DO have the power, of course you may not be speaking about this
from first hand , although it does sound like you have never been inside their server room
; )
Noncommittal, but still quite a waffle considering the previous stance. Inductive reasoning based on the latter statement would support the introduction of rich media ads - if ads are merely search results, and search results are no longer limited to text...
(Is that Evil I smell?)
It's actually "Marissa Mayer".
Where's the third option that different from those?
Think DNS, where each site has authority for its own domain --- in effect the domain file is a noddy index to one aspect of the site, in this analogy.
Can DNS be abused? Of course it can, and it is, daily.
Is it a problem? No, because the majority of people are not abusers, and (barring bugs) a messed up domain file affects only one site.
And that would be exactly the same in a distributed search system, with the aggregators playing a role slightly like that of the DNS root nameservers --- ie. a forest for the top level of your multiple parallel search queries. (Don't take the analogy too deeply, as root nameservers don't aggregate anything, and the DNS tree is static.)
The big difference would be that the search aggregators wouldn't have a central root role, ie. you could select any set of aggregators you like, and pit them against each other, just like you do with your local list of nameservers today --- an ideal situation for improvement through competition.
And anyone could become an aggregator, if they have the bandwidth to support queries and responses. Notice that a website like Google's would not be required since this could be a network service with its own protocol, although many aggregators would have an end-user website too of course.
Now you can see who's /.ing your prefered sites:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn
The results look the same as they always have... There's just a new nav bar in the very top of the search results to toggle between news, videos, etc.... And that isn't even persistent on every page, which is utterly annoying... So if I'm searching web results and I click the nav to go over to "News" for instance, the nav is GONE!! Lame.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
So far all I see is slightly screwed up interface with another extra "top bar" added on top of "iGoogle". I don't need it there. I like the way it worked before.
But on top of that, Google has been so adamant at killing off search spam, that lately my search results started to become less and less relevant. So I switched to the Russian search system Yandex instead. While they may have lesser part of the interned indexed, I have a better luck with their results. Heck, even Live.com seems to become more pleasant results-wise.
Hyperom.com
Wow. I took one look at the google labs page on these new "features" and thought "I'm going to get really annoyed if I ever try to use this". A simple usable interface with good results is exactly why I have loved google... if they go to a cluttered interface with pop-up menus by default I'm going somewhere else.
Get a web developer
I was under the impression that a lot of people, like myself, used Google because it didn't have all the clutter and crap other search engines 'offered'.
All we need to do a search is the search bar.
Could this be the major breakthrough of search where one could choose not to include results from blogs and shopping-review sites?
To: All Military (Sub)-Contractors
Give all the Iraq War contracts to my Fellow War Criminals.
Feloniously,
George W. Bush
Sincerely,
Philboyd Studge
When I saw a menu at the top of Google's search page, I thought "They've lost it. Google has jumped the shark". They want to be a "portal", five years after that was a good idea.
Notice that the most prominent link to click on is "Advertising programs".
You used the word "sporting" twice within the same sentence . . .
So you require every search result to be recommended by at least two different remote systems, and you use a web of trust/reputation so that each system can grade the others by how correct its users find their results to be.
If I'm consistently getting bad results from www.spammers-r-us.com, I drop their weight to zero, and heavily downgrade all other systems that have a positive weighting for them too. Maybe I add a bit of forgiveness over time, in case a bad system improves its reputation.
Where's the hard part?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The new tool bar or what ever the call it, means that I can actually see the logout link in Gmail now (I need to disable the setting of absolute fonts to be able to read pages, and most break because of stylesheet abuse)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I agree completely, with half dozen to a million posts on here. Universal Search needs to better or it needs to go. In the mean time Google can I please have it back the way it was until you figure out how to do whatever you want to do right? All I want is a link above the search bar for Images Maps and News in whatever order they were in, and when I search for something that is not an image maps or news I just want those results. I hate universal search, it is very frustrating.