Google is combining its different Web search services into one “Universal Search” service that will present Web sites, news, video and other results on one page. Universal Search means that standard Google searches will draw results from separate properties covering books, local information, images, news, and video,

The combined search would include any site indexed by Google's services. On the video side, for example, it will include YouTube, Google Video and independent sites like Metacafe.com.

In addition, the company is introducing new navigation features at the top of every Google page that let users to quickly hop between its different properties.

For example, users of Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, can jump instantly to search, calendar, documents, and other services.

Google is also preparing a translation service that converts queries into other languages, allowing a user to comb a broader swath of the Web

The technique will translate queries in any of a dozen languages into English, find additional search results, then automatically translate those back into the language of the original query. This will give users in any supported language a broader view of information on the Web. “That by itself will open the Web to different languages,”

I'm looking forward to the translation and navigational enhancements, which combined with google translate perhaps could finally destroy the language barriers throughout the Net. I'm not so sure about the multi-media search, though. I look for pictures or movies quite seldom, and I fear that including those in my search results can complicate matters too much, slowing me down. I hope that there will be an option switch this off, although I do believe the in-book searches may compensate for all this.

On the other hand, I have nothing against anything that google introduced so far, and all changes only added to the my positive image their services. They may surprise me again, coming up with some brilliant new interface to accommodate those new features. We will see.

This post has been edited by xerxes: May 20 2007, 03:55 PM