Google Suggest - Universal Search

This Google update is pretty simple. When you are on the home page, Google will suggest some ideas for keywords and shows some universal results even before you have pressed enter.

This new update is only available for the .com and doesn’t work with Google UK. It is also very limited; just useful for the weather and some basic functions (conversion rate…). It is far from what I would call a ‘universal’ search… if you are looking for ‘Nike logo’ nothing shows up (same for ‘London map’ or ‘tiger wood news)’.

Google Suggest - Universal Search

Anyway this function has the possibility of expanding, and consequently being more useful, with more media integrated into it (map, news, football result, image, video…)

Right now this update is too limited and very few people will even see it. However, at least Google is trying to do something a little bit different from Bing or Yahoo

The new Google live search has finally appeared on the Google UK results page. It is just a little window with a continual feed of information. Most of the results are from Twitter and news websites.

Google UK Live Result - Tiger Woods

It is hard to say if this is a good initiative, obviously the quality of the links can be very poor because the content is judged the same way as a traditional website. You just need the keyword to be on your Tweet to be on this little window. I think that a lot of scam will happen with this new functionality as well.

Anyway, it is a new and interesting function that shows that Google can crawl extremely fast through a different number of sources, but in the long term I don’t see the additional value of it compare to the traditional Google news result