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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."
There's major advantages to Google universal search over Yahoo! oneSearch Yahoo!'s Alpha (Beta) Search. First, file type suggestions (e.g. Video, News, Images) are suggested based on where valuable content exists. If you search for "Google", you get Web and News on the header since there's a lot of web content and news about Google. But you don't get "Video," since there aren't many valuable videos about Google on the current web. (You can still get video by clicking on the top header, though, but it's not a suggested search.)
On the contrary, with Alpha(Beta) search you always get the YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo! News links on the right sidebar. There's no feedback as to whether they're potentially interesting until you click on them and judge for yourself. Same thing goes with Yahoo! oneSearch -- it's just a bunch of data listed on one page, without much filtering by possibly relevant datatypes.
But my favorite part of Google universal search, and I must admit that I work at Google on unrelated projects, is the ability to play videos right in the search results! I haven't seen anything like it on other major search engines. And it's great that the videos aren't off to the side, or up at the top -- they're mixed in the normal results and ranked quite appropriately! Which is great for me because it shows me how relevant the video actually is, whereas videos on the right hand side of Alpha(Beta) may be relevant or may be irrelevant, but with no guidance given.
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IIRC you could get Natalie Portman images inlined in Google search results before 'Microsoft Windows Live! Search' even existed. This is about improvements in the integration with video et all and the first major interface change to Google in a while.
You mean, like this http://www.google.com/search?q=natalie+portman
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I also hate that switching is not automatic. Earlier if I tyoed in something in the search box and click on news it would search the text already typed in in news search and show the results. Now if I click news whatever I had typed in disappears and it shows the default news page and I have to type it in again.
**Life is too short to be serious**
I agree 100%. Google, change it back, please.
Either they fixed that since you posted your comment or you're on crack.
Bug closed - WORKS FOR ME.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Exactly - and now I have to enable JavaScript for the whole of Google.com, or the entire menu bar vanishes! Not hard to do with Firefox's NoScript extension, but Google needs to have a sensible fallback when JavaScript is disabled.
Getting something this basic and visible so badly wrong is not a good sign - it's hardly rocket science to provide fallbacks...
Where is this new search?
Just search. I just searched for Microsoft, and got web (default), patents, and news options. The patent search is pretty nice, they've laid out the patent in a nice, clear manner, including links to cited patents, etc.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
There's a subtle difference here, actually. I should state now that like a previous poster, I work for the big G, but not on universal search.
The OneBoxes you have seen on Google for years and you see now on Live/Yahoo search are useful as far as they go, but are limited architecturally. They're basically an intersection between {your query, top N popular queries on image/book/whatever search}. So if you're searching for an image of something on web search that isn't a hot celebrity, you probably won't see the box.
That's a problem because you won't see the onebox for queries that should probably show it. Fixing it is hard, for scale reasons. As the post on the Google Blog implies, there are "issues" with sending every query from the massive web search traffic stream to every property. What's more, even if you could do that, how do you decide when to show the onebox? Even though you can now search images/books/videos for every web search query, it doesn't necessarily make sense to include results, especially not at the top. So you need to blend them into the web results somehow. But PageRank is no use here, how do you rank a book against a web page? So you need new algorithms too.
I will admit that at first this looks simply like moving the onebox around the page a bit. In fact it's the groundwork for much more than that - it's building a "search engine" instead of a "web search engine with extra bits". If you do a query and there are 5 relevant books, 3 relevant web pages and 2 relevant pictures, then that's what you'll see instead of today where you have (maybe) a onebox and then 10 web pages.
"Moving from a clean interface to a cluttered feature-laden experience"
Where is this cluttered feature-laden experience you speak of, so that I may complain with you?
Google's search pages still look pretty much the same to me. So they added a few relevancy-related search category links and did some very minor reorganization. This is cluttered how?
I know criticizing large companies is everyone's favourite passtime, but think about what you're saying just a little before you start.
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
; )
It doesn't violate my NDA (well, actually, my employment agreement) because it's public information. There's lots of stuff I know that I can't talk about, but if a web site's written a story about Google, or Google's issued a press release, I'm free to link people to those pages, dictate what they say, and provide my opinion so long as there's not forward looking statements or an appearance that I'm talking on behalf of Google. When I previously worked at Adobe I could do the same thing after I signed a blogging agreement.
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