The most striking aspect of Google’s new Universal Search pages is the embedded video, where searches relevant to content on Google Video and YouTube will be rewarded with actual video viewable on the page along with the usual relevant text links.

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, suggested that YouTube might be seen in a new light other than pure entertainment. He said:

“There’s an incredible research value to video and it’s underappreciated and underutilised, many people don’t think about learning how to ski or whatever, it doesn’t necessarily occur to you, but now, with this coming up in our results, I think the diversity and usefulness [of YouTube] will become apparent.”

Even easier to imagine is text ads on search result pages having the same windows opening up with a click on a ‘+” sign to show relevant video and increase Google’s earnings potential.

Google’s rivals are working on similar innovations – such as Microsoft’s Live Search using Sea Dragon and Silverlight technology – and it needs to respond.

This could be the beginning of a summer of announcements from Google on different fronts. Speaking to reporters after the Searchology event, Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, said there would be announcements in the coming weeks that would show “we are still doing some crazy, new things.”

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.

Continuing our live notes from the Googleplex on Google’s Searchology event, 11 am Pacific time, Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience, and Udi Manber, VP Engineering, are up next talking about the next step in the evolution of search:

Udi talks first, he joined Google 15 months ago, but has been working on search for 18 years, he is head of search quality efforts.

“Search is hard, very hard, scale and diversity are huge, really huge, 20 to 25 per cent of the queries we see today we will have never seen before.

"We understand context – ‘b&b AB’ means bed and breakfasts in Alberta and we know that, with Ramstein AB, AB means airbase, for ‘types of dogs’ we will also insert better ‘breeds of dogs’ query results. If you search for ‘Why is search so hard?’ – the results are pretty bad, so there is still room for improvement.

"One of our main efforts over the last year was to improve our quality for languages all over the world. Location results also improved and made more relevant – Cote d’Or results in Australia gives you sites relevant to the chocolate brand. In Belgium, where the chocolate is made, you get the chocolate and the French region results. In France, you just get the French region.

"Cross Language Information Retrieval – allowing everyone to find any document in any language and translate it on the fly, we have been working on that for quite some time and we will be ready to launch very soon a way for you to directly search and get results like this for 12 languages. You will do the search, we will translate to English, do the search and translate the results back to you in your language. [An example Arabic to English is shown]

Udi winds up by juggling some apples and oranges to applause to illustrate something about how to order information. Not really any meat in this event so far, but Marissa Mayer is up next….

Live notes from technology director Craig SilverStein’s talk at Google’s Searchology event. He was Google’s first employee:

“Comprehensiveness, relevance, speed and user experience were the important things, we decided at the start.

Comprehensiveness: We crawled the 25,000 most important pages on the Web [in 1998]. We tried to crawl more web pages

June 26 2000 – Giga Google, [a billion page index] we were very proud when we had this [logo] on our home page, we celebrated with a MacDonalds. Now it all seems very quaint.

Relevance and Speed – a slide on walking to the library for info – slow, talking to a friend – faster, asking a computer on an old Archie Search – faster still. We realized that if we did it fast enough, people would use [Google] search for everything. Fast enough is about half a second, maybe a third, it seems instantaneous.

We’d like to do better, the earth is big and we’re restricted by light beams to our data centres and back.

The reason we did our Web page the way we did [minimalist] was because we wanted to make it fast to load. We kept making it smaller.

User experience: In the early days we didn’t do enough testing, if something was broken we heard from our users. Now we do much more testing in-house."

10.15am Pacific time, Ben Gomes, software engineer, and Kerry Rodden, senior user experience researcher, are explaining the basics of Google Search today, such as page ranking, at its Searchology event.

Interesting eye-tracking animation - a pink dot showing where eyes move looking for the search-results answer to “tallest active player in NBA”. Heat maps then produced to show which parts of the page are looked at the most, it’s like an F-shape in the top left of the page, first two results are very important.

They show how they take a guess about showing whether images, weather, maps, news links, stock prices relevant to the query should appear at the top of the page.

A newer feature is query refinements that show at the bottom of the page – alternative queries at the bottom of the page that might be closer to what the user wants.

9.30am pacific time: Google’s Searchology event is just starting here in Mountain View. It’s a day for the press and analysts to learn about what the agenda describes as the next step in the evolution of search. We’re starting with Search of Days Past from Craig Silverstein, Google’s Technology Director, then Search as We Know It Today, a talk by Ben Gomes, software engineer and Kerry Rodden, senior user experience researcher.
Then it’s Next Step in Evolution of Search - Udi Manber, VP engineering and Marissa Mayer, VP Search products and User Experience, before we get a Q&A and some search demos.
I’ll keep you updated on the morning’s events.

9.45am Eliot Schrage, VP of global communications, kicks off the event. He says the day is all about search – it remains and will always be the heart and soul of Google, he says, we are going to talk about where we’ve been, where we are now and where we are going.

He introduces Craig Silverstein, the first person hired by Larry and Sergey and the “ghost of search engines past.” He was hired while they were still doing it as a research project at Stanford, Sergey’s dorm room was their business and operations centre and Larry’s was where the data centre was located – three loud computers keeping his roommate awake at night.

Virtual worlds are to get their own Oscars and two of the richest and best known in-world characters are behind the new Virtual Academy.

Ansche Chung, a real-estate developer in Second Life, and NeverDie, a nightclub owner in the Entropia Universe, announced the academy on Tuesday and said its first award nominations would be made in February 2008.

The academy’s mission is “to promote the creative community behind the rapidly developing virtual worlds and recognise landmark events and achievements in all areas of Virtual Artistry, commerce and culture; and host an annual awards show, the Virtual World Awards, to enhance awareness of the Virtual art form.”

No word on the categories yet but there will be a Hall of Fame, which Ansche and NeverDie must stand a good chance of being inducted into themselves.

I expect this award ceremony will be held in-world and the Avatar trophy being modeled on the website can probably only be proudly displayed on a virtual mantelpiece.

IBM may be submitting a number of entries based on its hyperactivity in Second Life, with 4,000 employees now active there, up from 800 in December. On Tuesday, it opened its first virtual business centre.

It says: “It will be unique because it is staffed by real IBM sales representatives from around the world, not robots or kiosks, who can chat with visitors in several languages and build business relationships.”

Benchmark Capital, the Silicon Valley VC firm, is building itself an interesting portfolio of online gaming and social networking companies, sometimes choosing start-ups that fuse both elements.

On Monday, it announced an $8m investment in the Swedish online sports games publisher and developer Power Challenge.

Power Challenge offers the Power Challenge soccer game with impressive 3D visuals, which can be played for free via a web browser. It also owns Manager Zone – a strategy game for soccer and ice hockey management.

Johan Christenson, chief executive, says Power Challenge has not licensed famous players or clubs for its games but has focused instead on the gamers creating their own stars and playing each other across the world.

It makes money from in-game advertising and premium services such as the ability to create private cup tournaments, leagues and badges for clubs.

Elie Wurtman, a Benchmark general partner, told me: “This is another investment where we see people transitioning into an online experience. Sports is the biggest category in console games and we believe this could be a global online gaming portal. The graphics engine and the way they are delivering the games can be the basis for delivering other major sports.”

Benchmark has invested in Linden Lab, creator of the Second Life virtual world, and San Jose’s Gaia, an online world for teens.

Last December, it invested $18.5m in Red 5 Studios, a developer founded by former employees of the most successful online role-playing game, World of Warcraft. It is also an investor in Funtactix,  “a next-generation fusion of online games and social networks.”

Electronic Arts held its summer preview of forthcoming attractions in San Francisco on Wednesday, with the announcement and demonstration of The Simpsons game taking centre stage.

This is not based on the forthcoming movie. It is 8,000 lines of original dialogue from the TV show’s writers - the equivalent of three episodes.

The gameplay shown was distinctly ho-hum, but it was elevated by typical Simpsons humour. The characters are aware they are in a video game and a biting parody of the industry is promised for its release in the autumn.

It is good that EA, the world’s biggest video game publisher, is prepared to send itself and the industry up, but it’s own financial performance could become the subject of satire at the rate it is continuing to underperform.

EA can generate huge amounts of cash from its established sports franchises such as Madden NFL and series such as The Sims, but it has suffered over the past two years from games slipping, being of middling quality and generally lacking inspiration - it has failed to come up with blockbusters of its own lately to match the Halos, Guitar Heroes and Grand Theft Autos of the gaming world.

Its fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday were another disappointment, but John Riccitiello, who replaced Larry Probst as chief executive last month, does seem aware of the company’s failings.

He told an analyst conference call he had been called in to drive an agenda of change: "We will focus on improving execution…my sense is that we can be faster and better focused… we’ve had some issues with predictability in our titles that we’re focused on to bring up the quality. It’s not always met our objectives," he admitted.

He said he had enormous confidence in Spore - one EA title showing genuine inspiration and being worked on by Will Wright, the creator of The Sims. But Spore was being pushed out of  current fiscal year financial planning, he said, and might still be 12 months away from release.

Development of Spore began as long ago as 2000 and it was first shown at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. Despite the undoubted genius of Will Wright, the delays that EA is permitting smack of indulgence and even a little desperation about its need to prove its creative credentials.

Spore could endorse them, but it may never be enough of a financial success to justify its overlong gestation.

Steve Jobs was in a feisty mood on Thursday as he took questions from the audience at Apple’s shareholder meeting.

In his first public comments about backdating since the scandal broke last year, Mr Jobs defended his role, swatting down a question from an AFL-CIO representative who asked "what did you know, and when did you know it?"

"These issues are sometimes a little more complicated than they appear," Mr Jobs said. He said comments by Fred Anderson, Apple’s former CFO, who said he warned Mr Jobs about the accounting implications of a backdated options grant, were "wrong."

"I’m not going to go into any more detail," he said. He read from a statement by the SEC that praised Apple for its "swift, extensive and extraordinary cooperation" in the agency’s investigation into the company.  "Unless you think there’s a conspiracy involving the SEC I don’t know what else to say," Mr Jobs said.

Later in the Q&A session, Mr Jobs tangled with Greenpeace, saying the environmental group’s ranking of companies’ environmental performance was "based more on statements made at conferences than on any science."

Greenpeace and other green groups present at the meeting praised Mr Jobs for Apple’s decision last week to outline its environmental initiatives. But when asked whether Apple would be willing to establish formal relationships with groups like the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Mr Jobs demurred.

"We’re not going to set up an infrastructure to deal with environmental groups," he said. "Our focus is on getting things done." However, he said Apple would be willing to work with green groups to develop a common ‘report card’ for measuring companies’ environmental performance.

The biggest barb of the day was reserved for Apple’s old nemesis. Asked why Apple didn’t consider spending more of its cash to invest in devloping new products, Mr Jobs said:"I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a cheque." Then, without missing a beat, he added: "If that were the case, Microsoft  would have great products."

While Intel was launching its Centrino Duo and Pro platforms on Wednesday and showing off colourful laptops, its venture capital arm was announcing an investment that revealed part of its strategy for smaller devices.

Intel Capital said it was leading a 3^rd round $15m funding of Jajah, the Silicon Valley-based internet phone company with more than 2m users.

This was a little different from its normal VC funding, as the deal also included Jajah gaining access to certain Voice over IP patents earned by Intel, relating to software phones running on a computer.

Up to now, Jajah has based its business on using VoIP inside the network. Users type in their number on its website and the number they want to call and then the landline-based phones ring at either end as regular telephone companies complete the call, removing the need for a Skype-type headphone/microphone/computer software setup.

"We believe computers will become phones and phones will become computers." Trevor Healy, Jajah’s new chief executive told me, explaining an expansion of its strategy.

That is something Intel would like to believe as well. It has been like a dog with a bone when it comes to dog-and-bone devices. It finally gave up on mobile phone chips last year, selling its business to Marvell after years of failing to penetrate the market significantly.

Now it may be trying to make that call again, with its low-powered Silverthorne chip embedded in Mobile Internet Devices (Mids) and using software like Jajah’s.