As expected the event really kicked off when Google VP of Search Products & User Experience Marissa Mayer came on stage. Her presentation was the most noteworthy of Google's Searchology event... definitely worth waiting for and suffering through the previous speeches, in my opinion of course. Marissa announced the company's new search engine dubbed the "Universal Search". Now search results will combine both text, images and video content displayed by relevancy. This new Universal Search is already the current default search engine and there's no turning back: the "classic" text search results are gone forever. Here are in a nutshell the other announcements of the day:

- new hardware architecture: although the idea of universal search is not a new one, to make it happen requires a completely new hardware infrastructure ie new servers for the various "vertical" search indexes like Images, Video, News, Local, etc;

- contextual navigation links: these are links to other Google search indexes (Blog, Book, Groups, Code...) that appear on top of the search results page, under the Google logo, and that enable a user to drill down into a particular technical information/vertical index... thus "contextual". Try for example typing Python (the language, the animal, etc);

- the universal navigation bar sits on top of the Google homepage as well as all pages of user facing products and allows to easily navigate between the different Google products (not yet active on my pages!). And the bar changes and it presents the nearest neighbour for each of the activities. So if you are on search, you'd likely to go on Images or News and the links will appear on top of the page. But if you are on Gmail you are more likely to use Calendar or Documents. And for all the other Google products, you can still click on the "More" link and they will appear on a drop-down menu.

- the Google Experimental web site: until now Google often takes new search features and offer it to a small pourcentage of random users "which is helpful because we can see how users are going to interact with these new features and make predictions but it's also frustrating". With this new site hosted under Google Labs, all users can now see the latest user interface experiments. And when you sign up for an experiment it makes it part of the default of your search experience on Google, so you don't have to come back to some special site to see these features. Google Labs will continue to exist and will host stand alone prototypes where you need to go to a specific site to start using them versus opting-in to an Experimental project.