What do these items all have in common?  Images, News, Finance, Blogs, Books, Catalogs, Code, Phone Directories, Maps, Patents, Products, Academics, Video, Web.

They're all specialized search engines provided by the undisputed king of search, Google.  For several years now, Google has been steadily adding new specialized searches to its list of products, increasing the amount of information the average user can quickly access from just one site.  However, unless you already know about them, their existence is often less than obvious.  This resulted in several great tools that could drastically enhance a user's search experience, being ignored and unused.

To deal with this problem, Google is doing what other search engines have long talked about doing: integrating specialty search engines into the primary search.  Called Google Universal Search, through a combination of technical tweaks under the hood, and some UI magic, Google is now trying to present the user with relevant entries from any applicable specialty search.  The new Google interface and system is not widely available yet as it is being rolled out over the next several days.  If you haven't seen any changes to Google yourself and want the full story on all the changes, SearchEngineLand.com has an outstanding and very detailed look at the new Google and what it means.