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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."
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to work , when you pay your taxes.
Aha, a glitch in the Google.