Google will make a significant push toward integrating results from a variety of its search engines in an attempt to deliver as relevant and comprehensive a result set as possible to search queries.
Although Google and its competitors have been moving in this direction for years, Google’s announcement on Wednesday is its clearest and most concrete statement of direction yet regarding its efforts in this area. The announcement was made by Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of search products and user experience, at an event in the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Almost all of Google’s revenue is generated from ads it runs along with its search engine results. To that end, Google announced it is resolutely moving toward what it calls a “universal search model,” while acknowledging it is still far from where it wants to be in this area, which is to deliver a single set of results culled from all its engines.
Google also updated its homepage design and tweaked navigation features to accommodate the collated set of results.
Internet search providers like Google, AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft offer, in addition to their general Web search engines, a set of specialty engines that deliver only news articles, photos, local business listings, blog postings, maps and video clips.