Google Universal Search: Intriguing and Confusing
It's one thing to watch a demo of a major change to how Google presents search results, as I did today at the Searchology event at the Googleplex. It's another to sit down and experiment with it. Which is what I've been doing just now with Google Universal Search--which is not a new Google search engine but a revision to the "main" Google that weaves videos, news, books, and other results into the Web-page results you get.
As I've been using Google Universal Search--which the company says is rolling out today and may not be fully up and running everywhere until tomorrow, and will remain a work in progress--I've come to the conclusion that "weave" is the operative word here. Google isn't just giving you results clustered by type (which is what a number of sites do--including us). Instead, it's trying to intelligently mix everything together, varying the balance and positioning of different sorts of results depending on what you searched for.
When Google's Marissa Mayer showed off GUS (nice acronym!) today, she did a search for Steve Jobs. When I do that query right now, I get the following, in this order:
Some image results:
And then three Web results, followed by some news results:
Then three more Web results, followed by a video of Jobs' Stanford commencement address, which you can watch without leaving the search results:
Followed by two more Web results, then some "related searches," and finally News archive results" (which are older stories from news sources that have online repositories that go way back):
Google, presumably, is kind of saying that for Steve Jobs, images are more important than news stories, which are more important than video. But when I do a search for his Redmondian competitor Steve Ballmer, it leads off with Web results, then gives me the famous Monkey Boy video, then a bunch more Web results, and finally some images. There are no news results at all, even though Ballmer is in the news more or less continuously.
For Los Angeles, a map and news results are up top, before Web pages; for New York, the map's up top, but there are no news results...and there are blog results, which I don't get for LA.
If I'm searching for Sherlock Holmes stories, a query for The Hound of the Baskervilles cleverly puts two versions of the story on Google Book Search up top. But if I search for The Return of Sherlock Holmes--which is also available on Book Search--no book results show up at all, at least on the first page.
In short, Google Universal Search doesn't yet exhibit its universality in any particularly predictable fashion that I can discern.
Another new Google feature unveiled today puts links to particularly relevant specialized Google results immediately before your "universal" results. Returning to the Jobs example, Google shows links for Web, News, and Video results:
But if I search for Jerry Falwell, who's certainly made news this week, Google Universal Search puts news results up top, but doesn't include a link to news results in that new list of relevant sections.
Does this post feel like a nitpicky reaction to a potentially major search innovation? I don't mean to be a wet blanket, and these are first impressions, not a definitive verdict. Google Universal Search is but a few hours old, and it's possible that some of my results were impacted by the fact it's still being rolled out. I haven't done that many searches; it's possible that the ones I've tried aren't particularly representative. And Google's press release on the news is headlined "Google Begins Move to Universal Search," which certainly suggests that it's saying that the technology as it exists today is a first draft of an ambitious idea.
Just as important, GUS doesn't have to display results in a predictable fashion to be valuable--especially since you now get an improved version of the topmost Google navigation links that let you jump to images, news, blogs, and other types of results with one click. If you want to find results of a certain type on Google, in other words, you can--GUS or no GUS.
What Google is going for, I'm sure, is an approach to "universal" search that--eventually at least--is as eerily effective as the engine's plain-vanilla results have always been. I'm guessing that newsworthy people will reliably have more news high in the results, TV stars will get you video, and fictional characters will return links to books. If it's smart and subtle, it could be both extraordinarily useful and kind of magical. Google being Google, I'm optimistic that this is all going to make sense in the long term.
I do worry a bit about that name--"Universal Search" suggests that it's the one search engine you'll ever need. Clearly, though, you'll frequently want to venture into Google's other tabs for important results that doesn't show up in the main page. At least for the time being.
"Google Web Results With Some Other Stuff Sprinkled Here and There" might have been a more accurate name for GUS as it stands, and one that would be less likely to result in disappointment. I can understand why it's not the one they chose, though....
Postscript: Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan has posted a remarkably long item on GUS, with lots of insights and much information about the thinking behind the new features.
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
Survey says...
http://www.buzzdash.com/?page=buzzbite&BB_id=17380
Will be interesting to watch this in the coming hours. I personally found GUS a bit confusing, but maybe it's just a matter of getting used to it.
I find it confusing as well and though this may sound nitpicky it isn't for those of us who do many searches in an hr and that is why did they move the vertical selection to the upper left of the page instead of over the search box.. now i have to scroll all the way left with the mouse when before it barely took a movement.. this is a serious issue for me as I have carpal.. add to that the confusion and well it seems about as badly implemented as the new analytics are for the business user.. I am not sure what is going on there.. and normally I am much more generous with my comments, but combine those issues with the irrelevancy of their results lately and I am getting Googled out.. sometimes it is best.. to understand.. if it ain't broke - don't fix it..
CANNOT CANCEL MY ONLINE PC WORLD ACCOUNT … I’ve tried with e-mails etc but PC World won’t either give me instructions on how to do this, and won’t do it themselves. I guess I can keep posting silly messages like this in order to use the account they won’t remove.