Lorcan Dempsey on Google's "Universal Search"

You may have noticed that Google's search results have looked different from earlier this month, especially if you are searching in English, using google.com, with results returned across its major services from a single search.

Here, for example is the result for searching on mount everest, with links to web, maps (useless actually!), and images, all from the one search result.

Lorcan Dempsey, who used to work for JISC and is now Chief Strategist for OCLC (a giant worldwide library cooperative), has written a thoughtful piece about Universal Search, which is what the new development is being called, albeit not by Google. (Take particular note of some of the experimental features that can now be reviewed in Google Labs.)

One angle on these changes concerns user training. Conventional wisdom has it (had it?) that users need training on new software. An alternative approach - as in this case - which avoid the hassle of having to maintain help files or other documentation, is to change what is already superficially very intuitive software gently and incrementally, and assume that users will find out how to use the new features more-or-less of their own accord, helping each other out if they get stuck.  Of course that option was not really open when software was distributed and installed locally by the user. Once software is hosted "up in the sky somewhere" then it is: and my guess is that most readers will not have even noticed what is, behind the scenes, a very big change to how Google works. If they've not noticed, they definitely did not need any training.