Google Searchology Day: Recap Of Announcements

It’s Searchology Day today at Google, where the company is devoting time to look at the past, present and future of search at Google. There will be a number of significant announcements coming out of the event. Want to keep up? Stay tuned to this page. We’ll keep it updated with a summary of major developments plus link out to more in-depth coverage we’re providing about some of the news. Want in on the action?  The webcast is here and runs from 9:30am to 12:30pm Pacific Time.

News from the event:

1. Universal Search: Do a "regular" search and books, news, video, image and local results blended into one single page. It will still mostly be web pages that dominate, but the verticals will be more noticeable. See our very long article detailing this, Google 2.0: Google Universal Search.
    
2. New Navigation: New top-left navigation to help you move within Google properties and contextually-changing navigation for search results have been added. See our article, Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide.
    
3. Google Experimental: A new place where you can experiment with Google interface experiments. See our write-up here, Google Experimental: Opt-In To Google User Interface Experiments. Try it here.
    
4. Meta Video Search: Within the Google 2.0: Google Universal Search, there’s a section that describes how Google Video is going to be listing video hosted from across the web, not just within Google Video or YouTube.
    
5. Google Views: Part of Google Experimental, Google Views lets you do searches and get back information presented in list, timeline and map fashion.
    
6. Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR): Google has a system it expects to debut within a few months that lets you search for information across multiple languages, even if you don’t speak those languages. You’ll enter what you’re looking for, and your search terms will be translated into other languages. Matching pages in those languages will be found. If they are among the most relevant, they’ll be translated back into your native language and shown in the search results. Google’s been working on this for years, first really hinting at it during the Google Factory Tour of May 19, 2005 that was a predecessor to today’s Searchology event. TechCrunch has a closer look at some of the slides from what was presented today: Google To Launch Cross-Language Search Engine; On-The-Fly Translations of Queries and Results. We also now have a closer look in Google Searchology: CLIR and Views.
    
7. Meaning Search: Google’s added a stemming function several years ago, so that a search for "runs" would match "running," for example. Coming in the future is meaning-based matching, Google says. For example, a search for "distance from zurich switzerland to lake como italy" might also be searched for as "train milan italy zurich switzerland."
    
8. Web Search Keyboard Shortcuts: Lets you skip around within search results using your keyboard, similar to how you can with Gmail. Access it via Google Experimental.

Live Blogging

• Searchology Event At Google Today, TechCrunch
• Google Searchology – Live Blog, AppScount

Roundup Coverage

• See Techmeme here and here.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Danny’s Live blogging coverage is available for Google Searchology 2009.