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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
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.
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.