May 16, 2007
Google announces Universal Search
Continuing our live notes from the Googleplex on Google’s Searchology event, 11.30 am Pacific time, Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience, is now speaking and finally we have some meaty announcements:
"Our first announcement today is Universal Search breaking down the silos of search integrating Books, Local, Images, News and Video. When you search on Steve Jobs you get pictures of Steve, news, video of Steve, related searches, news archive results – all these items integrated on a page to give you a much more holistic answer. Nosferatu, the horror movie still gives you an IMDB link, but also a video is there – 84 minute video uploaded to Google Video. We are also bringing it in from other providers such as Metacafe, for Google and YouTube you can watch it in the results page, for others it’s a link to their sites.
"Google Books – a search for Mexican poetry includes a Google Book result with cover, and pages. We think, blending content with search results, more people will discover the power of books.
"The "I have a dream" speech, you can see in the results page, the video of Martin Luther King’s speech.
"I showed this to Eric [Schmidt CEO) back in 2001 but we didn’t have the team to pursue it, it’s very hard, too computationally intensive to search across Local, Video etc, but engineers have developed a new infrastructure to help make this work and allows us to launch Universal Search today.
"We also had to create an entirely new scoring functions, new algorithms that we’re releasing. The final hard thing was displaying results, we went through a lot of prototypes, but in the end we said search should be easy and we should present it as an ordered list.
"Our second announcement is contextual navigational links on the top of the page to Web, News, Blogs, Maps, Images etc depending on the nature of your search.
"Gmail should be closer than eight clicks from the home page so we are announcing a Universal Navigational Bar across the home page, the bar changes to show the nearest neighbour to your activity – gmail would have calendar and documents next to it, we think users will navigate our site more successfully
"We are launching Google Experimental, where you can go and sign up and see all of the experiments taking place at Google. It will begin to appear in your Google Search experience."
That’s a summary of the announcements, Experimental is live now with signups permitted from next week and the other innovations will be available during the course of the day and Thursday. There’s been a short Q&A , which Sergey Brin, co-founder, joined. Updates later…but now it’s Google Lunch.
