New Google Search Will Find Text and Images
By Miguel Helft
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California: Google has changed its approach to internet searches by combining result from its established Web search service with offerings that help users find videos, images, maps and other content.
The new service, universal search, was introduced Wednesday and will gradually become evident to users. It underscores the continual efforts by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com to improve offerings to attract users.
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.
The notion of combining results from various categories of Web content is not new. All major search engines have taken step in that direction.
For example, a search of a city’s restaurants will pull up restaurant listings from local search services alongside results from the wider Web, like links to guidebooks or magazine and newspaper articles about dining out in that city. In same cases, search engines will display links to news articles or movie listings in a special box, if the results are relevant to a particular query.
“We try to answer your question in one shot by bringing a lot of things together”, said Eckart Walther, vice president for product at Yahoo.
In December, Ask.com began an experimental service, ask X, that shows results in 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 SearchEnginesLand, a Web side dedicated to Internet search.
“For the end user, I don’t know if it is that much of a difference today. We just haven’t seen how the blending of results work.”
The new service was a result of years of work by many engineers and search experts and involved significant new investments in manufacture, 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.
Google also unveiled other changes to its user interface that allow users to find some of its service, like Gmail, more easily.
And the company said it would soon start an automatic translation service that would allow Arabic speakers, for example, to search for San Francisco hotels in their language. The service would translate the query into English; search Google’s English-language index in the Web, where listings about San Francisco hotel are most likely to appear; and translate the results back into Arabic.
Yahoo said it had been offering a similar service in Europe for nearly two years.
Title (article) : New Google Search Will Find Text and Images
By Miguel Helft
From : International Herald Tribune, Friday, May 18, 2007 (page 11)
Internet address: www.iht.com
E-mail: iht@iht.com
