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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
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.
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 doubt they have a trademark on everything beginning with "i" (otherwise my buddy igor is in trouble ;)) but could this be a deeper beta-beta-beta of the Apple/Google partnership everyone keeps mumbling about? Otherwise, I agree - It does lend itself to people pointing out the "i-linkage" between Apple and Google, and free publicity for both can only be good ...
Bark less. Wag more.
Do you want to know...._what_ _it_ is....? Google is everywhere. It's all around us, even in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to work, when you pay your taxes. Google is the world that has been pulled over your eyes, to blind you from the truth. A prison...for your mind....Unfortunately, no one can be..._told_ what Google is...you have to see it for yourself.
This is your _last chance_. After this, there is no turning back.....You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up and believe...whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill.....you stay in wonderland...and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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.
Oh crap, I wrote "iDea", I expect a cease-and-desist letter now for that little iTem of trademark violation.
Oh crap, I did it again. Dammit!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai