Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Google Universal Search Needs Customization

Scribes far and wide are touting the revolution that is Google Universal Search, but I think the integration of results from across news, video, images, blogs and the general web hasn't gone nearly far enough.

Searching Google on a famous person, for example presidential candidate Barack Obama generates 20 results that include almost exclusively websites about the man with a touch of news and some links to StumbleUpon, but there are no links to videos and just a single thumbnail image.

For Universal Search to be a useful resource, Google needs to do two things: incorporate more images and create icons to show which pool the results came from, and allow users to customize the mix of results.

It is difficult to find the results that are videos, news or blogs, and using icons is the easiest way to do so. Users could quickly do straight to the type of content that interests them most.

Google enables users to specify a language, but we should be able to say how much news, video, blogs, or images we want in the mix. A ratings scale that says "how important is this to you" could customize how many blogs you see based on a scale of 1-5, or photo freaks could emphasize images over all else.

I want my own algorithm darn it, and it shouldn't be hard to do.

By John Gartner at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

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