Marissa Mayer, Google Incorporated"s vice president of search products and user experience, made the announcement that the search giant will make a significant push toward integrating results from a variety of its search engines. Internet search providers typically offer, in addition to their general Web search engines, a set of specialty engines that deliver only news articles, photos, local business listings, blog postings, maps and video clips. The inconvenience of having multiple search sites from one company has become apparent, not to mention the fact that many people are simply unaware of the specialty search engines beyond their main Web search sites.
Google seems to be the first to actually come to the point of correcting the issue once and for all and has begun to move towards what it calls a "universal search model," while acknowledging it is still far from where it wants to be in this area, which is to deliver a single set of results culled from all its engines. Results of this effort will be often subtle and gradual, the company warned. As part of the effort, Google is implementing a new technical infrastructure able to handle the intensive computational tasks involved in providing integrated results. An upgrade to the results ranking mechanism is also being rolled out.