Lots of Product Announcements At Google Today

google.jpgLots of announcements today at Google during their Searchology event. My live blogging notes are here and I’ve posted on their pre-announcement of a cross-language search engine coming soon. See SearchEngineLand as well.

Cross-Language Search Engine

Google’s Udi Manber mentioned in passing that they would soon be launching a cross-language search engine. More details here.

Universal Search

Google’s Marissa Mayer announced what amounts to a first step towards a “universal search model.” This is effectively an integration of results from all of Google’s vertical search properties (video, images, news, maps, books, blogs, websites) which are presented for searches at Google.com and are ranked according to Google’s relevance engine. There are a number of example searches in my notes from the event earlier today. Videos from Google Video and YouTube are embedded directly in results for viewing.

Video Search Now Includes Non-Google Sites

In January Google launched a video search engine that included only Google Video and YouTube videos. Today they’ve expanded it to include video from Metacafe and “5-6 other large video sites.”

Google Experimental

Google Experimental launched today. This includes a number of enhancements to Google Search. Adding any of them will change your Google search results. These include a timeline or maps view, keyboard shortcuts, left hand search navigation and right hand contextual search navigation. Note that Google Experimental is not the same thing as Google Labs, which contains stand alone applications.

Google Navigation Bar

Google’s home page and many applications now include a navigation bar that gives on-click access to popular products like Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets and Picasa.