We're here at Google's Searchology event in Mountain View. Google's Marissa Mayer has announced that the company is launching a new, integrated search experience Wednesday called Universal Search.
This means no more searching for videos, images or web results independently. Google will now combine search results for everything -- books, news, images and video -- onto default search result pages. Universal Search will re-draw Google's default search results pages as we know them, but the coolest development is that YouTube and Google Video players will now be embedded within search results.
Mayer gave a demo by searching for Steve Jobs. Right at the top of the page were pictures of Jobs and results for books about him. Below that were some relevant URLs, like his Wikipedia page and blogs about Apple. About four results down, there was a link to view a YouTube video of Job's Stanford commencement address. Clicking on the link instantly embeds the YouTube video on the page. Click play and start watching right there in the search results.
"We're more interested in providing real answers to our users," Mayer says. "Not just the ten best URLs."
Universal Search is live right now and accessible from most of the company's data centers. The new pages will propogate across all Google servers and show up in default search results everywhere by tomorrow morning.
Images, news results and videos will show up on different parts of the page depending on what you're searching for. The different elements will be arranged on the page based on relevancy. Search for "Los Angeles" and you'll see maps, images and news results first. Seach for "John Grisham" and you'll see books, images and web results at the top.
Mayer says that in addition to Google Video and YouTube, which will show up when Universal Search debuts, Google is going to roll in videos from other video properties on the web. Only Google Video and YouTube videos will be embedded in the page in their own players. Videos from services like Metacafe and Revver will appear as a thumbnail. Clicking on that thumbnail leads to the video's page on the third-party site. Mayer says Google will return any video results picked up by Google's standard web crawls.
There are also some new suggested search algorithms on display here. At the bottom of the Steve Jobs results, suggested searches appeared for Steve Wozniak, Pixar and the iPod.
Mayer also announced an enhancement to Google's default navigation system called the Universal Toolbar that makes it easier to move between Google products, as well as the launch of a new site called Google Experimental. The site will live within the Google Labs ecosystem and it will give users the opportunity to test out the new ways of navigating search results Google's working on. For example, you can go to Google Experimental and use keyboard shortcuts from Reader and Gmail to navigate search results.
