Whoever thought that online search was all about finding web pages is obviously wrong.

It just happens to be so that search engines have largely focused on search web pages. But that changed today, when Google unveiled its Universal Search.

The company from now on will start offering results from the web, books, news, images and videos. All of these are ranked based on relevancy. So a search for "steve jobs" first offers images and then a wikipedia entery.

17 May 2007

"Nosferatu", a classic thriller movie, gets you the IMDB entry, followed by an embedded video from Google Video.

The introduction is especially important for online video. As Google co-founder Sergey Brin pointed out, video has just been promoted from entertainment to a research medium.