Google Gives Tour Of Its Search Factory

Google, known more for its relative silence than its grand Steve Jobs-y "one more thing" type presentations, gave onlookers an extensive "Search Factory Tour" yesterday via webcast. Two and a half hours later, there was a lot of news to report.

Google's vice president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, emceed the event, which would include revelations about local search, universal search, Google Health, and ads on Google Image search.

Presenters at the event included R.J. Pittman, Google's search product management director and co-founder of Web 2.0 search company Groxis, who spoke about Google's experiment with placing display ads with images; Johanna Wright, director of search quality, who relayed where Google is going with universal search; and Microsofty-turned-Googler, Carter Maslan, who said local search isn't as easy as one might think.

Mayer provided the one-more-thing by officially unveiling Google Health, which allows people to store their medical history online and decide which medical services providers can access it - a sort of data portability for your health records.

Rather than detail all of the announcements in one dense post, we've divided them up into nice digestible chunks.