Googles Universal Search Isn’t Bad
But it isn’t perfect either…
Interesting news for the search engine marketing community as Google announces the implementation of it’s new Universal Search. Put simply the universal search combines videos, news, books, maps and images into the results for a particular query.
To test this new type of result we searched for Steve Jobs, da boss at Apple - and sure enough the results page had three sub menus, one for the web (normal search) and one each for News and Video. On the displayed page were three sample images followed by normal web results - and this is where the results were far from perfect. For some reason Google is giving massive preference to Wikipedia pages, so instead of the Apple website being number one on the results page it was in fact, number two to Wikipedia’s number one. How can an online encyclopedia built by volunteers with very little control (and lots of opportunities for corruption) be more of an authority on Steve Jobs than the Apple site itself?
Clicking the other two tabs gave a selection of news and video sites - and very nice they were too. This Google Universal Search is great - I am not about to try to find things wrong for the sake of it. Without doubt, Google is the world’s greatest search engine but little details like the Wikipedia thing really bug me.
Read the Guardian article on Universal Search here
