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Google Expands to 'Universal' Search

Posted by samzenpus on from the triple-awesome-metasearch-coming-soon dept.

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."

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Why not Live or Yahoo stories? by choseph · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".
    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+port man&form=QBRE

    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.

    1. Re:Why not Live or Yahoo stories? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Why not Live or Yahoo stories? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Re:Where is the distributed community search? by GeneJoker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Search for: "Business Software Solutions"

    Results:

    www.lolita-ultracore.com reports that it has a 100% relevance score for "Business Software Solutions".

    www.geocities.com/mykawaiiwebcam reports that it has a 100% relevance score for "Business Software Solutions".

    www.we-report-that-we-have-a-100%-relevance-score- for-everything.com reports that it has a 100% relevance score for "Business Software Solutions".