My friend Susan Doran just pointed me to Yahoo Glue search, an interesting new beta search results page from Yahoo India. In essence, it's an attempt to provide the same kind of universal / blended search results that Google does now, but it seems a lot more intelligent to me; particularly when you're looking for a topic that has deep content in specialized areas of the web.
In essence, Yahoo Glue splits out the real estate in its search results page to surface various kinds of content. In a search for nanotechnology, for example, there's a column along the left with traditional web search results, but the Wikipedia article on nanotech is featured front and center, as are several HowStuffWorks articles (HSW is, in my opinion, crack for geeks like me), images, articles from Yahoo News, and blog entries (from Google Blog Search, interestingly). Depending on the query, you'd also see links to videos, LastFM, YouTube, WebMD, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Maps, Flickr, etc.
Datawocky has a very good write-up of Yahoo Glue:
The Web today is a far different place from what it was when Google's search paradigm was invented. The web was then a collection of documents; it is now a collection of applications. Applications such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Yelp. Each application has its own deep collection of data, and we tend to think of them as being different information types rather than just "web pages". Yet the search model flattens each of these rich interactive services into a collection of web pages that can be indexed -- that's really putting very new wine in a very old bottle.
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