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Industry News

Google's Universal Search

Tech Crunch - May 12

This week, Google released their Universal Search and Search Options features at their Searchology event – check out the TechCrunch article for a full recap.

Over at the Google Blog, it says that these changes were motivated by a desire to give users more tools and options to “slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier” – the important piece of this is that the actual search results are not changing – users are just being given new ways to view the data.

This really goes back to a greater issue that a search for “Go to Paris” gives me 192 million results – with some of the first being about men at Paris fashion week and Paris & Nicky Hilton. The changes that Google has rolled out don’t address the idea that my initial query was misinterpreted to begin with. Real time search and the ability to filter my results by type (videos, forums, reviews) don’t solve the problem that I said I wanted to “go to Paris” and not “please find me the Go Away Paris Hilton Video” (which is the first video result).

I think that some of the new tools, such as Google Squared (see screenshots here) – make sense for comparative analysis. But, for the general public, it remains to be seen whether or not users will adopt these new services and tools.