A major change that many don't notice

By Peter Vogel

Last week, completely without fanfare, search engine giant Google rolled out the first significant change to its bread-and-butter product in quite some time: universal search.

In fact, you might argue that it was the first major change since Google search appeared a decade or so ago.

The change was largely transparent to many users, and that is certainly a good thing from Google's perspective. Google's strength is "search," and it is the speed with which results are returned, coupled with the sparse, you might say bare, appearance of the results pages that is the product's hallmark.

Until now Google has kept its search results stratified into strands such as web, images, news, videos, and maps, and users had to consciously switch between them, using services such as YouTube and Google Maps.

In part there were logistical reasons for such separations. More recently there have been legal reasons. Various media properties have successfully sued Google, particularly in the European Union, arguing that the Google News service was benefiting from their newspaper headlines and story summaries, even though the links took readers directly to the papers' own web servers.

In part, those legal issues have kept advertising from the Google News pages.

The recent changes may spur further challenges. You see, universal search blurs these search divisions into one. It is clear that Google's customers want to see the company move to a more multimedia-based results system that pulls several areas of search into one.

Several of Google's smaller competitors have rolled out multimedia search in the past year or two, and it seemed that Google was destined to stay the course with plain text results. In fact, Google engineers have been working, if not frantically, then certainly feverishly, for more than a few years to pull off this first version of universal search.

Tampering with the company's golden goose, you can bet, required guarantees from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that speed would not be compromised and that typical users would find the visual changes subtle rather than radical.

After running a test with about 100 students in various classes I'd have to say that Google has pulled off its rollout of universal search without a hitch.

I first had my students launch the Google service. In my school's case, Google's engines recognize the originating address as being in Canada and so a call to google.com actually rolls over to google.ca. As I write this piece the google.ca site has not yet made the switch; in my class test I therefore had the students click on the "Go to Google.com" option that appears on the .ca page (it's surprising how many Canadian users have never noticed that option).

Once the Google.com page had opened I asked if anyone noticed a format change to the page. Only about half, and even then with prodding, noticed that the typical "Web, Images, Groups, News, More" line above the search box had been moved, almost out of sight, to the top left of the screen.

For a first test I had the students enter Martin Luther King's words, "I Have a Dream." Besides the usual text results Google now returned a video clip that plays within the Google results session.

Furthermore, at the bottom of the page Google now returns broader categorized results headings that can be used to explore other avenues, a radical development for Google, if not for certain competitors. Quick test: "George Bush" brings up a collective pointer to "George Bush jokes" along with seven other categories.

A test on "Mona Lisa" returns several images along with many links. At the bottom of the page a potential new moneymaker: original newspaper stories, at $4.95 apiece, in this case about the 1911 theft of the painting. These articles draw on a New York Times archive stretching back to 1851. At $7.95 a subscriber to the service may download up to 100 articles in a one-month period and a yearly fee of $49.95 permits up to 1200 downloads.

My students seemed to embrace the Google changes. They particularly liked the manner in which a single search would identify, at the top of the page, those Google areas from which content could be drawn. For instance, a search on "White House" identifies available content in maps, images, and news, in addition to the standard web resources.

Also introduced as part of the improvements is Google Image Labeler, a new feature of Image Search that allows users to label or tag random images (think flickr) to help improve the quality of Google's image search results.

Try a search on "Beatles" to more fully appreciate the scope of Google's universal search, and over time expect to see this approach penetrate more mundane lookups.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.