Introducing Google’s Universal Search and Blended Results

Google officially launches its Universal Search system today. This is going to be a major change to Google’s search results that will mix listings from news, images, local, video and book search engines that Google gathers from crawling web pages. The rollout happens today for searchers using Google.com in English.

A new navigational interface within Google’s search results and among several Google properties is also rolling out today, after the testing period. These new ways to navigate are replacing the years long vertical search links above the Google search box with top left-hand side of page location. There is also a new Gmail link added to Web, News, Video, Images and Maps search. From now on, it’ll be referred as “Google Navigation Bar”.

What Universal Search does is taking all the silos of info from “Vertical Search”, those links above the search box on Google’s homepage, such as Blog Search, Book Search, Directory, Finance, Images, Local/Maps, News, Video etc., combining all these searches with “regular” results and turning them into one. That is Google’s Universal Search and it is meant to fix the invisible OneBox insertions that get little visibility and clicks. In Universal Search, Google focuses on relevancy of topic-focused search to improve results – and ultimately the user experience.