Google’s latest move - Universal Search

I have been noticing some subtle and not so subtle changes happening over at Google for the past few days now. Google’s personalized home page has been renamed to iGoogle - search results has started appearing subtly different with new groupings and they had started putting more links in the classic Google Home Page. To illustrate what I mean check out this search for Jon Stewart - notice the bar showing all the different searches.

I was initially thinking, that this was simply another refining of the search experience and I thought I’d blog about it when I when I saw this announcement at the Google blog.
They have done, what - despite the looks of it - is a pretty big revamp…

Its called Universal Search - and it promises to be a merging between textual search and rich media search that should rock the search engine world and put even more distance between Google and Yahoo (Microsoft is still a distant third IMO). They are calling it the first move in pretty big re-design of their search engine, with a goal towards providing a universal search across all types of content - web, news, images, books, video, blogs, etc. This implies that now not only does your search entries return results for relevant web-links but also relevant new stories, books, blog entries and if relevant videos. From the UI point of view the user sees a white vertical navigation bar that groups the results by category. Vertical search companies better watch out - if Google can pull this off they are in trouble.

It finally reveals the strategy behind Google’s purchase of YouTube - more fodder for the search monster Apparently not enough though since Google has also announced that their video search is going to search against the collections of other properties also.

Another major product or rather a new area is Google experimental. This is an area where new enhancements to the Google Search page is available for people to try out. I especially like the timeline feature and the keyboard shortcuts feature.

References :-
Search Engine Land
Google 2.0: Google Universal Search
Techmeme
http://www.techmeme.com/070517/p2#a070517p2