More Google Searchology: Google Universal Search

Google's VP of search product and user experience, Marissa Mayer, is now presenting. She's saying there are a lot of non-inuitive advances that need to happen to make search good. "From my perspective, search needs to be easy. [And with Google,] search is easy."

Over time, she's saying, the Google home page has become an iconic embodiment of Google's approach to simplicity. And she's going to tell us about some new features.

Google, she's saying, is now a bunch of search engines--for pages, imagers, blogs, news, and more. That's kind of complicated--she likens it to having to figure out where your roommate might have left a pair of scissors. "You shouldn't need to think, 'If I were Google, where would I put the images?'"

Now she's talking about "Google Universal Search," and showing an example involving a search for Steve Jobs. She's getting pages, pictures, videos, and related searches for Mr. Jobs, plus news archives of Jobsian news going back a decade. If you'd done the search in 1997, she's saying, you would have gotten sites for job hunters and sites about a bunch of random guys named Steve. Search has come a long way.

With Google Universal Search, "we can understand the entity of Steve Jobs."

Now she's doing a search for restaurants in Mountain View--results from Google Maps are embedded into the main results.

If you do a search for "Nosferatu" in Google Universal Search, the second result is a video. Actually, it's a Google Video of the entire darn movie, and you can watch it right in the search results. She's announcing that other video sites beyond Google Video and YouTube will get indexed, such as MetaCafe.

Search for "Mexican poetry," and a Google Book Search result is in the results--an entire book of poetry by Octavio Paz.

If you're interested in Marin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, it's right there in the search results. You can see it rather than reading about it, without leaving the search results.

Here are a couple of goofy examples, including one involving people racing Big Wheels down San Francisco's Lombard Street, and one involving a Google employee piecing together a portrait of Abe Lincoln out of dirty pennies (sic).

Mayer is saying that Universal Search works with all queries, not just hand-picked ones. They wanted to do this as long ago as 2001, but it's only now that it's possible. It's tough, because it involves piping all queries through all the Google search engines.

Google Universal Search launches today.

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