When Google announced the Universal Search this week, I was more than just a bit skeptical. From my perspective, they already made it easy for me to dive into images, or video, or news, etc. By placing all these items on the page which is currently web results, they have to guess (although with very sophisticated engineering) what I want and prioritize it accordingly. As a user, I am okay with clicking a category link for a deeper dive.
Then, I waffled. I saw some results of the universal search and it was not overwhelming. They have done a good job of keeping the results clean in this initial foray. Images are there on top, but not too many to be a nuisance. News appears at the bottom, with a few article links available. Not yet truly integrated by relevance. So, all in all, the results are not bad.
Then, I waffled some more. If I was truly interested in news, I don’t want one or two articles at the bottom of the results. And a couple of images, if that is what I wanted, placed at the top would not suffice. I realized that my initial reaction, that it was a good clean result, was based on the fact that I usually want the web results, and these added categories were not interfering in any major way.
However, if I want news or images, or videos or books, then this provided too little of it. I will click on the category link, making the results of the Universal search somewhat moot. I understand that Google engineers are superb. However, when I type in Saturn, sometimes I am looking at the make of car, other times I am looking for pictures of the planet. Until I am actually searching, I don’t even know what I want.
Another chance to waffle… if Google can really evolve this tool (and it is just in its infancy), to provide results more heavily populated toward my intent, this will be great. But, until then, it is really cool engineering but not much more for the users.
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