Behind the scenes with universal search
Posted by David Bailey, Tech Lead, and
Johanna Wright, Product Manager, universal search
So when we were asked to make the vision
Marissa describes about universal search into a reality, we
admit we were a little daunted. Googlers had tried before to do
this without success — several times. Finding the best answer
across multiple content types is a well-known hard problem in the
search field. Besides that, we wondered if we had become too big a
company to pull off a project this complex.
Here's the challenge in a nutshell: Until now, we've only
been able to show news, books, local and other such results at the
top of the page, like this example for [
trends in education]. But it's a tall order to earn
placement at the top of our search results, so plenty often we end
up not showing these kinds of results even when they might be
useful. If only we could smartly place such results elsewhere on
the page when they don't quite deserve the top, we could share
the benefits of these great Google features with people much more
often.
One challenge was being able to regularly search through all of the
additional content types to find relevant results. After all, you
don't know if there might be a minor news story or an obscure
book relevant to your query unless you go and check. But
Google's massive compute cluster — and much effort by our
infrastructure experts — gave us a leg up on that one, and we can
now search these disparate types of information about as
efficiently as we search our massive index of web pages. We may
have melted down a data center or two along the way, but then bugs
are part of life in this business!
The next challenge was deciding when and where such results should
blend in. Fortunately we have some of the world's experts on
ranking, and have been able to apply the lessons learned on web
search to ensure that we show news only for newsworthy queries,
scanned books only when there aren't better web results, etc.
It can be tricky. As we learned the hard way, just because everyone
under the sun is writing about Anna Nicole Smith doesn't mean
news about her should show up for the search [baby names].
Lastly, we faced the challenge of the user interface you see on the
screen — the UI. The new UI for these results is subtle, but this
is one reason why the project is fun for our designers and
usability experts: they get to focus on creating a simple
experience for you. For example, with news results they designed a
compact look for the result that includes helpful items like an
image and a date, but is limited to just the most salient
information. Or take our book search results, which call out the
author and number of pages in the book. (Of course, we learned that
sometimes you don't even need to design a user interface. In
one early usability study, shortly after Barry Bonds broke Babe
Ruth's home run record, we asked people "how many home
runs has Barry Bonds hit?" hoping they would type [barry
bonds] into the search box. Instead, each and every one simply
blurted out "715".)
We also called on experts from each of our feature areas such as
News and Local, and were delighted to find our startup mindset is
alive and well. Folks from all over found spare time and pitched in
to get us to the finish line. There were many nights when we went
to bed knowing that plenty of the team's IM status still
reported they were online.
And after all this elbow grease, finally we have something that
works. What does it mean for you?
Although it's just a beginning, this first pass of universal
search focuses on video, news, local and books. Now you'll be
able to get more information Google knows about directly from
within the search results. You won't have to know about
specialized areas of content. If you're looking for the [
atkins southwestern pork fajitas] recipe, we can now link you
right to that page in the book. Or if, like me, you've been
busy these past few days and have not caught up with your Tivo,
don't type [
sopranos] into Google, because our news result will be a giant
spoiler. The search for [
rachmaninoff concerto 3] includes a video of Vladimir Horowitz
performing this piece (scroll down to see it), and [
Animator vs. Animation 2] is pretty cool as well. (And as
Johanna notes: I was delighted to see that when querying for my
son's name a video showed up too.)
This is just the tip of the iceberg in making Google results more
comprehensive and useful. It has involved launching a number of new
systems that will make it much easier for us to continue making
improvements so you get the most relevant information from our
varied content areas. We hope you like it. And finally, we're
especially happy to know that Google is still very much a place
where we can get big things done!
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