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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Expands to 'Universal' Search 138

Posted by samzenpus from the triple-awesome-metasearch-coming-soon dept.
ppadala writes "Google today unveiled its uber search which allows you to search for text, images, news etc. together. This is the result of unifying various search engines that Google developed for web, images, news etc. Google's main page and the results page are also sporting a polished look with a top menu bar sporting various search items."
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Google Expands to 'Universal' Search More

Google Expands to 'Universal' Search

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  • how very.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Thursday May 17, 2007 @04:34AM (#19158339) Homepage
    "sporty" of them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cruppel ( 603595 ) *
      Regardless of it's sleek, clean or [insert buzzword] look, they are attempting to provide a better visual hierarchy for their suite of services. I just spoke to someone who complained it's more work to switch between GIS and normal search now, as they have moved the links a few millimeters, but when you consider that each of those top links is a whole application, it's very sensible.

      Consider searching for some business, then clicking on Maps to find it, then clicking Gmail to send someone the location you

  • Didn't Y! have this already ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @04:41AM (#19158375) Homepage Journal

    If I remember correctly, Yahoo's oneSearch [yahoo.com] already did this ? Except it doesn't seem to be available for regular search.

    On the other hand, I've been playing around with the Alpha (Beta) [yahoo.com] search, which seems to be much cooler. But only available for australia (the cool interface must be due to their uber-cool [flickr.com] office).

    Heh, to put it mildly ... everybody's doin' it :)

    • Re:Didn't Y! have this already ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by panaceaa ( 205396 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @05:00AM (#19158497) Homepage Journal
      There's major advantages to Google universal search over Yahoo! oneSearch Yahoo!'s Alpha (Beta) Search. First, file type suggestions (e.g. Video, News, Images) are suggested based on where valuable content exists. If you search for "Google", you get Web and News on the header since there's a lot of web content and news about Google. But you don't get "Video," since there aren't many valuable videos about Google on the current web. (You can still get video by clicking on the top header, though, but it's not a suggested search.)

      On the contrary, with Alpha(Beta) search you always get the YouTube, Wikipedia and Yahoo! News links on the right sidebar. There's no feedback as to whether they're potentially interesting until you click on them and judge for yourself. Same thing goes with Yahoo! oneSearch -- it's just a bunch of data listed on one page, without much filtering by possibly relevant datatypes.

      But my favorite part of Google universal search, and I must admit that I work at Google on unrelated projects, is the ability to play videos right in the search results! I haven't seen anything like it on other major search engines. And it's great that the videos aren't off to the side, or up at the top -- they're mixed in the normal results and ranked quite appropriately! Which is great for me because it shows me how relevant the video actually is, whereas videos on the right hand side of Alpha(Beta) may be relevant or may be irrelevant, but with no guidance given.
      • I do get videos "mixed in the normal results", but I can't watch *those* in-place. That only works on the "video" result page. Seems like combining that would have been a logical next step here...
      • But my favorite part of Google universal search, and I must admit that I work at Google on unrelated projects

        And I believe you've just broken your NDA. Unless they don't have that pesky 'you're not allowed to say you work for Google until all of the info we have that you know, including your interview, is on public record' in your NDA, in which case hurrah!
        • Awesome!!!! Hopefully he will get fired so he can get out of the sweat shop that is Google. They pay very bad and they bribe you to work insane hours. No I don't work there and nor do I ever want to.

        • Re:Didn't Y! have this already ? (Score:5, Informative)

          by panaceaa ( 205396 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @12:24PM (#19164905) Homepage Journal
          It doesn't violate my NDA (well, actually, my employment agreement) because it's public information. There's lots of stuff I know that I can't talk about, but if a web site's written a story about Google, or Google's issued a press release, I'm free to link people to those pages, dictate what they say, and provide my opinion so long as there's not forward looking statements or an appearance that I'm talking on behalf of Google. When I previously worked at Adobe I could do the same thing after I signed a blogging agreement.

    • Cool indeed (Score:4, Funny)

      by xtracto ( 837672 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @05:35AM (#19158663) Journal
      On the other hand, I've been playing around with the Alpha (Beta) search, which seems to be much cooler
      It sures yields unexpected results

      Error: Bad Feed We're very sorry.
      Gremlins have stolen our ram.
      We sure will miss them.

      We are having technical difficulties. We will rectify the problem very soon. Please try again shortly.

  • Why not Live or Yahoo stories? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by choseph ( 1024971 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @04:55AM (#19158471)
    Why is this news -- because it is Google? The whole article is filled with "Google understands blah blah...but all their competitors do too and have been doing the same thing".
    No hot grits, but you can see natalie portman images inlined in the search results in live.com and that has been there for a while now. http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=natalie+port man&form=QBRE [live.com]

    Directly from the article:
    Google's competitors have also begun integrating results from their engines in various ways and with different approaches, but with the same goal in mind: improve the search experience for users.

    • Re:Why not Live or Yahoo stories? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 17, 2007 @05:34AM (#19158659)
      IIRC you could get Natalie Portman images inlined in Google search results before 'Microsoft Windows Live! Search' even existed. This is about improvements in the integration with video et all and the first major interface change to Google in a while.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ControlFreal ( 661231 )
      You mean, like this http://www.google.com/search?q=natalie+portman [google.com]

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AdrianZ ( 29135 )
        That "Universal" bar is only displayed on the initial results and doesn't stay there when you switch to Images, Blogs, etc. Eww.

        Somebody needs to join that Open HIG group!

    • Why do people care about Google's search and not Microsoft's or Yahoo's?

      Because people actually use Google.

    • Re:Why not Live or Yahoo stories? (Score:4, Funny)

      by bertramwooster ( 763417 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:37AM (#19159489) Homepage
      Dude, you just slashdotted search.live.com!!! They are probably not used to such load.

    • Re:Why not Live or Yahoo stories? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:39AM (#19159509)

      There's a subtle difference here, actually. I should state now that like a previous poster, I work for the big G, but not on universal search.

      The OneBoxes you have seen on Google for years and you see now on Live/Yahoo search are useful as far as they go, but are limited architecturally. They're basically an intersection between {your query, top N popular queries on image/book/whatever search}. So if you're searching for an image of something on web search that isn't a hot celebrity, you probably won't see the box.

      That's a problem because you won't see the onebox for queries that should probably show it. Fixing it is hard, for scale reasons. As the post on the Google Blog implies, there are "issues" with sending every query from the massive web search traffic stream to every property. What's more, even if you could do that, how do you decide when to show the onebox? Even though you can now search images/books/videos for every web search query, it doesn't necessarily make sense to include results, especially not at the top. So you need to blend them into the web results somehow. But PageRank is no use here, how do you rank a book against a web page? So you need new algorithms too.

      I will admit that at first this looks simply like moving the onebox around the page a bit. In fact it's the groundwork for much more than that - it's building a "search engine" instead of a "web search engine with extra bits". If you do a query and there are 5 relevant books, 3 relevant web pages and 2 relevant pictures, then that's what you'll see instead of today where you have (maybe) a onebox and then 10 web pages.

    • Re:Why not Live or Yahoo stories? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:27AM (#19160325) Journal

      Why is this news -- because it is Google?

      You guessed it!

      Just like the Lynx browser coming out in a new release isn't big news, Firefox doing the same is!
      News has a lot to do with impact among people.

      Live Search changing stuff only impacts a very small group of people in the geek community, for example.
    • And why were you looking for Natalie Portman images, hmmmm?

  • Apple will sue (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @04:56AM (#19158477)
    Did nobody else notice the iGoogle link on the top right hand corner? Doesnt Apple have trademarks on anything starting with a small i?
    • yep, that's interplatform service.
      Visit Apple's portal to find gApple.

    • Re:Apple will sue (Score:5, Funny)

      by ubrgeek ( 679399 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @05:21AM (#19158605)
      I doubt they have a trademark on everything beginning with "i" (otherwise my buddy igor is in trouble ;)) but could this be a deeper beta-beta-beta of the Apple/Google partnership everyone keeps mumbling about? Otherwise, I agree - It does lend itself to people pointing out the "i-linkage" between Apple and Google, and free publicity for both can only be good ...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ghoul ( 157158 )
        How about Google Apple and AMD joining hands to combat WINTEL. They could even pull in Sony and IBM on their side as tehy compete with Microsoft on XBoxes and with Intel on Cell processors. Then we would have 2 big behemoths of equal size. As for the useless services divisions that IBM has it is already getting rid of Global services so it will be techies vs techies. Sigh Daydreams....

      • Re:Apple will sue (Score:5, Funny)

        by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @10:59AM (#19163297) Journal

        (otherwise my buddy igor is in trouble ;))
        Do you have any iDea if he writes his name as iGor?

        Oh crap, I wrote "iDea", I expect a cease-and-desist letter now for that little iTem of trademark violation.

        Oh crap, I did it again. Dammit!
    • I have a gmail account as well as a personalized Google home and noticed the "i" a few weeks ago.

    • Did nobody else notice the iGoogle

      Dear FSM, yes I have. I'm still looking for a feedback button to tell them it's retarded.

      Maybe that's what Google needs - a user moderation system. You know, something that'll keep a score for the page, maybe even let users flag it as "imformative" or "insightful". I seem to remember that somebody around here has something like that...

      • Personally, I agree that the "iGoogle" page is kind of a silly renaming. But no where near as bad as their choice to change "Froogle" to "Google Product Search (beta)." Why take something successful with a cool name and shoot it in the foot like that?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lintux ( 125434 )
          Probably because nobody understood what Froogle means. (Mainly non-English speakers, possibly.) Too bad, Froogle was a nice name. :-(
    • Oh dear God I hope not. That would just be laughable.
    • I think they planned the name change for a while, the address for the personal homepage is http://google.com/ig [google.com], and has been from the start. I'm guessing they had the lawyers look at it.

  • so ... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    is this your final form?
  • Where is this new search? Usually Google doesn't announce things till they are ready (well, or at least beta ;-). One of the things I've always like about Google is that it seldom builds up some product/vapourware before it's release. Is that policy going to end now?

    • Re:Where is this new search? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Qzukk ( 229616 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @06:41AM (#19158985) Journal
      Where is this new search?

      Just search. I just searched for Microsoft, and got web (default), patents, and news options. The patent search is pretty nice, they've laid out the patent in a nice, clear manner, including links to cited patents, etc.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bcmm ( 768152 )
        Ooh! Wasn't doing that last time I looked! I wonder if it is being rolled out by region, or by random cookies like the last change was.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mgiuca ( 1040724 )
        I read the other day that in fact it's dangerous to search patents. If you see a patent and infringe it, you're liable for up to three times the damages than if you didn't know about it. This might not be so good!

        On a completely different topic, how annoying - this only applies to google.com. My default searches all go to google.com.au which is oldskool!
    • As of Thu 17, 21:51 Australian East time, the interface is the exact same ugly and boring simple interface from all time from my computer. Where is my eyecandy!?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Temporal ( 96070 )
      The changes were live at some datacenters when the announcement was made and should finish rolling out today.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lintux ( 125434 )
      Most likely it only works in the US. If you're somewhere else and can't see it yet, just try searching via a US server [google.com].

  • Where is the distributed community search? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @05:13AM (#19158565)
    Although everyone loves Google at the present time, it's still always puzzled me that people aren't working on a distributed search mechanism that could potentially be far more capable and powerful than Google.

    After all, individual sites are far better placed to index their resources than a generic crawler can ever be, for a number of reasons. They have far more efficient access to their local data for starters, and are able to do the indexing instantaneously as things change. Individual sites are also able to apply semantic information since they know what their sites are actually about, whereas a generic engine cannot possibly know.

    The sheer power available in a distributed search system would also be massively beyond anything that even the mighty Google could ever supply, for all the usual reasons associated with distribution and distributed computation.

    Once you recurse more than a few levels down a parallel distributed search tree, the available processing power and bandwidth just go totally astronomic. What's more, simply limiting the degree of query recursion would allow you to tailor your desired results/time behaviour, and since the intelligent tagging at each site would contain hugely more semantic information than currently, you could direct your searches far more effectively too.

    And it wouldn't be slower ether, because the distributed indexes are easily gathered by caching aggregators, and competition would no doubt provide plenty of those.

    I know that several distributed search efforts do exist, but the point here is that they have virtually zero takeup, largely because of the dominance of Google and the general state of happiness with centralized search technology. While centralization works more or less OK for now, distribution has the potential to provide a vastly superior search system in ALL respects.

    We really should be looking at it more seriously.
    • You're forgetting about one humble factor: spam sites. What's in it to stop a spammer from getting a hundred of high-end servers [or better yet, from using his arsenal of infested Windows PCs], and throw their resources on building an index to match his own agenda?

      • Not a problem, because of index localization (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        What's in it to stop a spammer from getting a hundred of high-end servers [or better yet, from using his arsenal of infested Windows PCs], and throw their resources on building an index to match his own agenda?

        Nothing stops him, but he'd still be creating an index only for his own site. He'd be free to distort his own index to his heart's content of course, but it won't affect anyone else. It would only distort the information searchable on his own site.

        You probably had in mind something like Majestic-12,

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
          Nothing stops him, but he'd still be creating an index only for his own site. He'd be free to distort his own index to his heart's content of course, but it won't affect anyone else. It would only distort the information searchable on his own site.

          Would you mind detailing what's your idea. In-site search engines aren't exactly unheard of. In-site search engine is in no way, form or shape a replacement for Google / Yahoo / Live, because the problem is how you get to the site in first place.

          And if it's distri

    • Re:Where is the distributed community search? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GeneJoker ( 549689 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @05:54AM (#19158759)
      Search for: "Business Software Solutions"

      Results:

      www.lolita-ultracore.com reports that it has a 100% relevance score for "Business Software Solutions".

      www.geocities.com/mykawaiiwebcam reports that it has a 100% relevance score for "Business Software Solutions".

      www.we-report-that-we-have-a-100%-relevance-score- for-everything.com reports that it has a 100% relevance score for "Business Software Solutions".
      • What if different machines are assigned sites to crawl, and could only report on those assigned sites? How about if several machines are assigned the same site, and only those results in the majority are accepted? These problems can be worked around.

        • What if different machines are assigned sites to crawl, and could only report on those assigned sites?
          Who assigns the sites?

          How about if several machines are assigned the same site, and only those results in the majority are accepted?
          Define majority.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by J0nne ( 924579 )
      I take you've never written a search function for a website? It's not simple, especially if you want the results to be as good as or better than Google. Why do you think so many sites have a 'search this site with Google' box?
    • I knew this guy who I used for my linux tutorials, he was a guru in all that is linux.
      He worked for google in the early days, and told me how he helped them set up their early server rooms.....hundreds of thousands of older computers running in a clustered format on linux, to
      do the searches of which you speak of.

      They CAN expand to hold up proper time frames for searches with this new search, if it already isnt that powerful, but I have no doubt they have the power to do the searches inside a parallel distri

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
      After all, individual sites are far better placed to index their resources than a generic crawler can ever be, for a number of reasons. They have far more efficient access to their local data for starters, and are able to do the indexing instantaneously as things change.

      Simple: sites can't be trusted. There are millions of sites trying to outcheat Google today. We don't want to end the battle prematurely, go home, and leave those sites take over the Internet, do we.

      Consider this: how successful a 100% P2P p
    • Each site caches and indexes themselves? I'm sure no one will find a way to game that system.
  • I wonder if adding as many services as it has added as quickly as it has added and changing things as quickly as it has added has made a small nimble company bloatware. Moving from a clean interface to a cluttered feature-laden experience that does everything reminds me of a certain word processor tool that can now do calculations and publish to my blog. The next google iteration will have links to creating a blog entry on your search results, wikiing the results in your wiki, emailing the results, saving
    • "Microsofting", "wikiing"; I don't know why they don't just googleize everything to a more ISOed format. It would be a lot more businessified for the internetted generation.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by kiracatgirl ( 791797 )
      "Moving from a clean interface to a cluttered feature-laden experience"

      Where is this cluttered feature-laden experience you speak of, so that I may complain with you?

      Google's search pages still look pretty much the same to me. So they added a few relevancy-related search category links and did some very minor reorganization. This is cluttered how?

      I know criticizing large companies is everyone's favourite passtime, but think about what you're saying just a little before you start.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by MrNaz ( 730548 )
        The last 4 characters in your username are a dead giveaway as to why you do not conform to the common mindset around here.
    • Yoogle

  • Terrible interface (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @05:45AM (#19158713) Homepage
    I hate the way they've stuffed the options up into the top left hand corner. Now I have the drag the damn mouse up there, click on the link I want, then drag the damn mouse back to type in what I need.

    Granted, the focus moves the search box but the search results page looks clumsy and is unintuitive.

    Google, change it back. There's no shame in admitting you made a mistake.

    • Re:Terrible interface (Score:5, Informative)

      by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @05:50AM (#19158733)
      I also hate that switching is not automatic. Earlier if I tyoed in something in the search box and click on news it would search the text already typed in in news search and show the results. Now if I click news whatever I had typed in disappears and it shows the default news page and I have to type it in again.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by QuantumG ( 50515 )
        Either they fixed that since you posted your comment or you're on crack.

        Bug closed - WORKS FOR ME.
        • Nope. If you click 'search' and THEN hit 'news', it works. But if you just type something in the search box and go 'oh crap I am in the wrong area' and click 'news', it does not remember the search box text.
          • It's kind of the whole point of universal search that you don't need to pick which web property you're on. It's all available from the same universal search box - the one on google.com. That said, what you reported sounds like a bug/feature regression.

    • I second that (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bueller_007 ( 535588 )
      I agree 100%. Google, change it back, please.

    • No Classic search?? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by mtmra70 ( 964928 )
      In addition to the tool bar being moved up to the top left, why is there no way to filter out the news, video, etc?

      I just tried searching for "halo 3 beta" to get some info on it and a lot of blog and news results were being displayed inline. At times, I would like to just search the web with the ranked results, not the additional fluff. "-news" seemed to not remove the news article from being displayed first.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Temporal ( 96070 )
        The query [halo 3 beta] only brings up one news cluster. The rest of the results are just your standard web results. Blogsearch is not yet part of Universal Search.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by mtmra70 ( 964928 )
          I did have a blog cluster in the results, it was 3 lines - maybe it was removed or disabled - but I did see it.

          Also, in addition to the news cluster, I took any result with a time/date stamp next to it to be a news result.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Temporal ( 96070 )
            I did have a blog cluster in the results, it was 3 lines - maybe it was removed or disabled - but I did see it.

            Oh, I see. You're talking about the bottom onebox (the blog links at the bottom of the page). That's actually not new. Currently, that will only appear at the bottom, never in the middle of the results. (Similarly, seeing images at the top or bottom isn't new, even though many news articles seem to think it is. It's only blending of books, news, maps, and video that are new.)

            Also, in addition

    • Re:Terrible interface (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cato ( 8296 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @06:39AM (#19158969)
      Exactly - and now I have to enable JavaScript for the whole of Google.com, or the entire menu bar vanishes! Not hard to do with Firefox's NoScript extension, but Google needs to have a sensible fallback when JavaScript is disabled.

      Getting something this basic and visible so badly wrong is not a good sign - it's hardly rocket science to provide fallbacks...

    • Re:Terrible interface (Score:4, Funny)

      by jackb_guppy ( 204733 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @06:52AM (#19159043)
      I was hoping that this new BAR interface was a opps. But it is not. Change it back GOOGLE and stop being evil.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by setirw ( 854029 )
      I hate the way they've stuffed the options up into the top left hand corner...

      Funny, it's worked for Apple for all these years... :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Temporal ( 96070 )
      The search results don't look any different than they did before, except when news, maps, or video results are blended in. But even those are pretty straightforward. Can you explain the "clumsy and unintuitive" comment a little more?

      The tabs have moved from being directly above the search box (where there wasn't enough space for them) to being on the top bar... a whole, like, inch away from where they were before. Or are you specifically complaining about the home page, where the distance is further? P

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Uzuri ( 906298 )
      Hah, and to make it worse, the options don't even show up if you have javascript turned off.

      I'd like to tell Google to stuff it, but I've yet to find a better alternative.
    • And the menus don't even work in Konqueror. They appear, but no text is visible.
      I thought Google would pay more attention to web standards... But since even GMail still has trouble with anything but IE / Firefox, I'm afraid I must be wrong.
      Very disappointing, Google.
    • The interface is so great it doesn't even work with Konqueror. The drop down menu supposed to display more 'search flavours' when you click on "more" doesn't even show up, but is instead replaced with a nice white useless rectangle. How am I supposed to search groups with that? This "Universal Search" is probably not that universal when it comes to browser support, huh?
  • I only see the altered layout on the home page, but nothing universal about it? anyone got an exact link?

  • Clusty (Score:4, Interesting)

    by s122604 ( 1018036 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @06:26AM (#19158911)
    www.clusty.com I'm loving this search engine. Besides the big G I find its the only one worth trying. It is especially good when your search terms are ambiguous or have multiple meanings. For example "Web Service". That has a meeting and a connotation for developers, but a much more accepted connotation to the public at large... Clusty immediately separates these into nodes so you can focus on what you are looking for... Now if they only let you set up your own clusters (nodes) It would totally rock.
  • I use Google web services all the time. Lately, however, some of them are giving errors with "Please try again in 30 seconds" a lot.

  • universal search model (Score:3, Funny)

    by bl8n8r ( 649187 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @06:45AM (#19158997)
    seems to need work though. searching for boobies just returns a bunch of pics of seagulls.

  • Unfortunately... (Score:3, Funny)

    by bluemonq ( 812827 ) * on Thursday May 17, 2007 @06:51AM (#19159039)
    ...'Universal' Search still can't find where you put your car keys.
  • All they are doing is exactly what they do now. Intergrate more results from images and news etc, into the main body of results. It seems like they are just announcing it for some press really and to point out they are going to keep doing it more and more as time goes by. Its probably being driven by the fact they have, for a while had now, no space above the search box for all the lab ideas going live, so this is the only way to neaten up the list and remove the clutter of search options so as to stop it
  • ... can it find my socks yet?
  • omgz it's teh web 2.0!
  • strange... why hasn't live.com adapted the changes yet?...

  • yes, all very nice but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by owlnation ( 858981 ) on Thursday May 17, 2007 @07:51AM (#19159681)
    Ok, so I understand the concept behind this change. At least, in part I do. It's a reflection on web 2.0 hype - blogs and video being more popular.

    However, somehow I think Google may be missing the point. I'm certain I can't be the only person who is finding less and less relevance with every search request I type. How does this change improve that state? If anything, as far as I can see, it's adding even more noise to drown out the signal.

    Especially where blogs are concerned, my (wholly unscientific and subjective) impression is that at least 60% of all blogs are just SEO link farms (ironically, the majority of which are hosted by Blogger).

    Web 2.0ish, but all style, gloss and less substance. So yes, very Web 2.0ish

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Temporal ( 96070 )
      Err... Google is constantly working on improving the quality of results, but they don't announce those improvements because (1) the details are closely-guarded secrets, (2) the changes aren't really visible (just improved ranking), and (3) there are too many to announce.
  • I for one would like a search engine that will stop displaying darn e-commerce sites every time I try to find information on a topic. I can't count the number of times I'm looking for info on a particular part and have to wade through 50 sites trying to sell me said part. How about cutting down the universal a notch and giving me specifically the type of results I'm looking for?

  • ... Is a bigger issue by far than this. I really liked that way better then NexTag for finding pricey stuff.

    I think that with every reduction/reintrodution of their branded search itemization they lose a little stature. If I have to figure out that "Products" used to be Froogle then the user has to re-discover what they know is already there. Familiarity breeds success when you're talking eyeballs.

    Not to go off topic, but reducing the stature of Froogle is no different than Yahoo jacking their site around

  • Now you can see who's /.ing your prefered sites:
    http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn [google.com]
  • The results look the same as they always have... There's just a new nav bar in the very top of the search results to toggle between news, videos, etc.... And that isn't even persistent on every page, which is utterly annoying... So if I'm searching web results and I click the nav to go over to "News" for instance, the nav is GONE!! Lame.
  • So far all I see is slightly screwed up interface with another extra "top bar" added on top of "iGoogle". I don't need it there. I like the way it worked before.
    But on top of that, Google has been so adamant at killing off search spam, that lately my search results started to become less and less relevant. So I switched to the Russian search system Yandex [ya.ru] instead. While they may have lesser part of the interned indexed, I have a better luck with their results. Heck, even Live.com seems to become more pleasa
  • Wow. I took one look at the google labs page on these new "features" and thought "I'm going to get really annoyed if I ever try to use this". A simple usable interface with good results is exactly why I have loved google... if they go to a cluttered interface with pop-up menus by default I'm going somewhere else.
  • Could this be the major breakthrough of search where one could choose not to include results from blogs and shopping-review sites?

  • When I saw a menu at the top of Google's search page, I thought "They've lost it. Google has jumped the shark". They want to be a "portal", five years after that was a good idea.

    Notice that the most prominent link to click on is "Advertising programs".

  • The new tool bar or what ever the call it, means that I can actually see the logout link in Gmail now (I need to disable the setting of absolute fonts to be able to read pages, and most break because of stylesheet abuse)

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