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Google goes 'universal'
17/05/2007 09:13 - (SA)
Mountain View, California - Google went live on Wednesday with a revamped internet search engine that integrates video, books, maps and news into "universal" results to online queries.
Google spent two years transforming the architecture of its search engine to broaden results to include web pages that one had to previously seek out in separate search categories such as "photos" and "news".
"It's all the stuff on the web," said Google's vice president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer.
"The assumption is that if it is there and it is findable on the web we should get it."
The "Universal Search" platform delivers more comprehensive results and raises the profiles of Google features such as online books and video, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
"In a way it is a doubled reward because it gives more exposure to our other features such as books," Brin said after the launch was announced at the company's campus in Mountain View, California.
Broadening the gap
"It's a little bit of a shame that until now they were underutilised."
Mayer announced the search engine overhaul at a one-day "Searchology" conference focused on Google's evolution since it launched in 1998 and some of its plans for the future.
"We certainly feel we are Number One and are broadening the gap," Brin said when asked about how Google was doing against rival internet search firms.
"We are very happy with the progress we have been making."
Navigational links atop search-result pages let users "drill down" to particular types of information if they wish to focus exclusively on specific categories such as news, according to Mayer.
Google on Wednesday also launched a website where internet users can peek at features the world's most popular online search engine is experimenting with.
The website at www.google.com shows tests Google is doing with services such as generating time-line charts and maps to put search results into chronological or geographical context.
'Speaking' your language
People are able to sign up to take part in the Google experiments, Mayer said.
Google said "very soon" it will launch software that translates queries from any of a dozen languages into English, scours the internet for relevant web pages and then converts the results to a searcher's language.
"That, in effect, will make the web universal," Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber said while describing the "cross-language information retrieval" feature.
"We have been working on translating all of the web to all languages. The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there."
Google held firm that it is vigilant about respecting copyright material such as books, music and video and that it is keeping general, not personal, search data stored to protect the privacy of users.
And while Google is working to better organise the world's knowledge online, it insisted it is still leaving room for creative disorder.
"I think chaos is important in the right proportions," Brin said. "We have always run our company with about 20% chaos."
- AFP
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