Google launches universal search Google announced yesterday that users searching the web with its site will be treated to a veritable bounty of results from now on. No longer just the useful links you were after, but an array of video, pictures, and news will all be returned by a single search query. Google has dubbed the idea "universal search", which we …
...over the web from Google's own servers. So effectively this "announcement" says that Google has managed the amazing technological feat of getting a web bot to crawl its own servers.
Be astounded at this marvel of marvels! What will they come up with next?
Simply throwing more and more data and media into the search don't necessarily improve the quality, just the search scope. Sometimes I'd rather be able to make my search more constrained, not more inclusive ("uncheck adverts/blogs here").
Google's "one search fits all" policy may potentially push valuable information down in favor of undesirable sources. I dislike paging on websites. I'll quickly scan through 100 results if they're shown, but the inefficiency of paging is too much for me. So I never see "Page 2".
On the other hand a single unstructured search is simple and doesn't require much thought, all of us can appreciate that some days. That's perhaps why many people use google in the first place.
Personally I feel google is a giant mono-culture. Google's algorithm always returns the most popular ones (greatest inbound links, creating a self reinforcing loop). I want my results to be a little different from everyone else's at work/school/etc in order to find information they may have missed.
Article on using page quality rather than page popularity...
"Page Quality: In Search of an Unbiased Web Ranking"
oak.cs.ucla.edu/~cho/papers/cho-quality-long.pdf
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