Mountain View, California: Google said on Wednesday it is combining its different Web search services into one “Universal Search” service that will present Web sites, news, video and other results on one page.
Universal Search means that standard Google searches will draw results from separate properties covering books, local information, images, news, and video, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience.
“It’s breaking down the silos of information that have been built up. It’s a broad, long-term vision that will unfold over the next few years,” Mayer said. “We are really excited about what Universal Search could evolve to in the future.”
The combined search would include any site indexed by Google's services. On the video side, for example, it will include YouTube, Google Video and independent sites like Metacafe.com.
In addition, the company is introducing new navigation features at the top of every Google page that let users to quickly hop between its different properties.
For example, users of Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, can jump instantly to search, calendar, documents, and other services.
The company also is preparing a translation service that converts queries into other languages, allowing a user to comb a broader swath of the Web, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Udi Manber, said.
The technique will translate queries in any of a dozen languages into English, find additional search results, then automatically translate those back into the language of the original query. This will give users in any supported language a broader view of information on the Web. “That by itself will open the Web to different languages,” Manber said.
Universal Search means that standard Google searches will draw results from separate properties covering books, local information, images, news, and video, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience.
“It’s breaking down the silos of information that have been built up. It’s a broad, long-term vision that will unfold over the next few years,” Mayer said. “We are really excited about what Universal Search could evolve to in the future.”
The combined search would include any site indexed by Google's services. On the video side, for example, it will include YouTube, Google Video and independent sites like Metacafe.com.
In addition, the company is introducing new navigation features at the top of every Google page that let users to quickly hop between its different properties.
For example, users of Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, can jump instantly to search, calendar, documents, and other services.
The company also is preparing a translation service that converts queries into other languages, allowing a user to comb a broader swath of the Web, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Udi Manber, said.
The technique will translate queries in any of a dozen languages into English, find additional search results, then automatically translate those back into the language of the original query. This will give users in any supported language a broader view of information on the Web. “That by itself will open the Web to different languages,” Manber said.