Google is changing the way it presents search results, presents a new and more consistent navigation and will shortly add translated web pages to search listings.

Universal Search

Google is to integrate all search services into one “universal search experience”, Google Blogoscoped reports from the Searchology conference.

At first this will include results from Book Search, Blog Search, Image Search, Local, News and Video.

Google has for a long time included news or books search results in regular search results, but then as special links at the top of web search results. Now these listings will appear as links and descriptions that look more like regular search results.

Google also plans to include videos directly in the search engine results pages.

In Google’s own words:

“Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for.”

This integration has already started.

“Our focus has always been making our users’ search experience as simple and straightforward as possible,” says 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.”

Gord Hotchkiss over at Webpronews argues that “Universal Search” must be closely related to personalized search. The more Google knows about your search habits and your interest the more easy it becomes to mix results from various vertical “silos” or search services.

Consistent navigation

Google is also - finally - getting closer to granting wish No. 1 from our What we want from Google this Christmas 2006 article: Consistant navigation.

Google has added a “Universal Navigation Bar” in the upper left hand corner of all Google pages.

Unfortunately, we will not see the same links on all pages. If you’re on a search engine results page, you will - for instance - see links to Images and News, but if you’re using Gmail you’ll see links to Calendar and Documents.

That being said, the “more” link at the end of the list of navigational links do bring up the rest of the services, which makes them much easier to find.

Thank you, Google!

Contextual Search Navigation

In addition to the Universal Navigation Bar, Google will also add a list of links to relevant alternative search services (like news or blog search) under the query text box of search engine results pages.

These search options will vary according to the what you are searching for.

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR)

Google is also developing cross-language search.

Searchers using one of 12 languages will shortly get English language search listings in their local language search results. Google will translate their search query into English and then automatically translate the relevant English results onto their local language.

A German searching for “search engine marketing news” may for instance get access to Pandia articles translated into German.

Today Germans will have to go to Google’s translation service and ask Google to translate a particular page (a service similar to Yahoo’s Babelfish).

So far translated pages of this kind has not caused much discussions regarding copyright. Google is in fact presenting a translation of a text it does not own and presents it on pages on its own domain. Normally this would have been considered a violation of intellectual property rights.

The reason Pandia and other Web publishers have not protested is the fact that they may get new readers this way (delivering them ads and selling them goods and services). We nevertheless expect this to be a much more hotly debated topic now that Non-English language searchers will be presented with more automatically translated content.

To sum up

Google has again demonstrated what an innovative company it is. Admittedly most of these innovations are incremental in nature. But that doesn’t matter as long as they are continuously able to improve the experiences of searchers.

See also:
How to survive Google Universal Search ranking wise (Pandia)
Google Experimental Views.
Google Searchology Day: Recap Of Announcements (Search Engine Land)
Google Searchology Lowdown Part 1 (Web Analytics World)