Google has changed its approach to Internet searches by combining results from its established Web search service with offerings that help users find videos, images, maps and other content on one page.
The move represents a significant overhaul of Google’s most-used function, will come in to effect soon and will be improved over time, executives told reporters at the company’s "Googleplex" headquarters.
It underscores the continual efforts by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com to improve offerings to attract users.
Universal search is designed to make it easier to find relevant information from different sources. Instead of using separate search pages for photos, video, news, archived news, scanned books and other sources relevant to a search topic, the universal search facility will find links to all of those sources in a single search attempt.
Until now, a Google search for "I have a dream" would have returned links to the text of the 1963 speech by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and to other historical and informational Web sites about him. But those looking for video clips or photographs of King’s speech would have had better luck by entering a query in Google’s specialized services for video or image searches.
The same query on Google’s main service will now return a single list of results that will blend text, videos, images, and even excerpts from books. The list will appear in the order that a Google formula deems to be most relevant.
"It is a much more powerful way to find out about this time period in history," said Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience at Google.
"I think of it as a pretty natural evolution, with the one interesting thing being the video side of it," said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Global Crown Capital.
The thing everyone is wondering right now is what an advertiser will be willing to pay for a video link, Pyykkonen said. From the advertiser standpoint, I think they will be interested in how to hook their customer better.
The notion of combining results from various categories of Web content is not new. All major search engines have taken steps in that direction.
"We try to answer your question in one shot by bringing a lot of things together," said Eckart Walther, vice president for products at Yahoo.
In December, Ask.com began an experimental service, Ask X, which shows results in a multipanel display that makes it easy to expand or narrow queries and search for videos or audio.
But Google’s service is the first that fully blends results into a single list that uses the company’s ranking algorithms to order them appropriately. The service will also allow users to play clips from Google Video and the company’s YouTube site directly on the search results page.
"They are changing the ground rules for search in a way that everyone has been talking about, but no one has done," said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand, a Web site dedicated to Internet search.
Providing the new search facility involved a complete re-design of Google’s homepage and its underlying architecture, representing the first major redesign of this sort in several years. The Google homepage will eventually display ads featuring video and display in addition to the traditional text ads.
The redesign also includes a Universal Navigation Bar at the top of Google search and other pages which will provide quick access to other Google services such as Images, Maps and Gmail. This will replace the links above the Google.com homepage search box.
The new service was a result of years of work by many engineers and search experts and involved significant new investments in infrastructure, Google executives said. And it represents only the first step toward integrating online content into a single search service.
"You are going to see us refine it," said Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president for technology.
The inclusion of images and video in Google’s main search service is very likely to open the door for graphical and video ads to appear alongside Google’s search results, said Mayer, the Google vice president for search products.
But she declined to say when that might happen. Google now inserts only text ads alongside search results, which accounted for roughly half of the US$10.6 billion in revenue Google did last year.
"For us, ads are (search) answers as well. I would hope that we can bring some of these same advances, in terms of richness of media, to ads," Mayer said.