Google has announced its new vision for search, and it involves bringing together information from different content sources, ranking them in real time, and delivering them as an integrated set of results.

So what this might mean in practice is that when you do a search on Google, instead of just getting a list of websites, you might also get videos, images, news, maps, and books. Google says the changes will be subtle at first, but it will become more obvious as the company gets closer to “delivering a truly comprehensive search experience”.

“Our focus has always been making our users’ search experience as simple and straightforward as possible,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.

“The ultimate goal of universal search is to break down the silos of information that exist on the web and provide the very best answer every time a user enters a query. While we still have a long way to go, today’s announcements are a big step in that direction.”

Google is upgrading its computer systems to allow it to produce processor intensive universal search results. The company is also releasing the first stage of an upgraded ranking mechanism that automatically and objectively compares different types of information. As always, Google search results are ranked automatically by algorithms to deliver the best results to users anywhere in the world.

“Google has continued to concentrate on improving the quality of search,” said Udi Manber, vice president of engineering at Google.

“The level and speed of search innovation at Google has increased. Most of this innovation addresses basic ranking algorithms and is often not obvious to users. Users just see more accurate results, more often, in more languages, which is our primary goal.”

Google has demonstrated time after time that it has the ability to innovate, and as this announcement shows, it has no plans to stop anytime soon.

Information comes in many forms, and when you’re doing a search, your main interest is in the information, not its form. The compartmentisation of search arose because the Internet in the early to mid 1990s was almost all about websites. Now, websites are just one part of the Internet experience, so of course Google is ensuring that its search service more closely matches people’s use the Internet.

At a time when so many computer companies lack vision (I won’t name them, you know who they are), it’s good to see Google continually thinking about its core service, and thinking about where it wants to go with that service. I think that this demonstrates that Google still has, the so called, “vision thing”.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 11:57 am under Google.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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