Obvioulsy, Google is incredible. They are the undeniable heavyweight champion of search.
The video below is Google's lovely and talented Marissa Meyer explaining universal search at the company's first-ever Searchology media event at its Mountain View headquarters on May 16, 2007.
The idea of integrating search results from multiple data sources is not new. I built "multisearch" when at iwon.com (ISH, now IAC Search & Media) years ago. The service has changed dramatically since then, given the dominance of Google's original super-simple results page and the IAC/Ask.com acquisition.
Over the past three months, iWon has been adding new search resources to its site ... iWon feels providing a variety of results serves its users better.
"A lot of people think simple is better and web pages [only] are better," said George Nimeh, iWon's vice president of search and special projects. "But for the time being, we are trying to surface multiple data in a clean and uncrowded way.
We surfaced web pages, images, related searches, news and a variety of other data from multiple sources. Sure, we didn't have video results, but who did back then? We had universal search up and running almost 8 years ago.
What is new is the fact that Google now owns and indexes all the data. What my team cobbled together from five companies/data sources, Google can do alone. That allows a hellofalot more efficiency and flexibility, both from a marketing and development perspective.
Mayer says that Google has wanted to create "universal search" since 2001. "Hundreds of people" at Google have been working on and perfecting gathering results, ranking results, and displaying results to make the product launch a success.
Our team worked with some great people from Inktomi, LookSmart, Direct Hit and Moreover, amongst others, but there were only 3 people on our internal development team.
We were having a great time, and we knew we were doing great work together back then. Nice to see that Google has finally caught up. Hehe.
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