The big search companies have been on a quest lately to come up with the ultimate content rich search engine, where results bring up images, YouTube videos as well as plain old text. Google calls their version 'Universal Search', and Yahoo's is called 'Glue' an unusual name, to say the least but the company is hoping that it will stick. The beta version is launched today by Yahoo India. Glue uses Yahoo's own search results in conjunction with results from other sources like Flickr, LastFM, Google Search and How Stuff Works.

The media rich search page is a great idea for popular search queries, like sports, travel, medicine and entertainment, etc where the subject has a prominent visual reference. Let's say for example you were to key in 'Madonna' or 'David Beckham' I'm sure there will be a plethora of media rich results, video, audio, photos—you name it —with or without underpants, but the format, however is far less effective when searching for subject about mathematical formula, or a guide on html code for dummies.

Glue has one other disadvantage in that content rich search entries will take longer to load which is obviously not good, but as broadband speed increases efficiency this will be less of a problem down the road.

While the 'more is more' idea sounds all nice and dandy, I'm still a little skeptical, I'm used to the plain text search, it's fast, simple and clean whilst making it visually easier to digest. From a design perspective Glue looks like a poor-man's version of Ask's 3D innovative search. Google's 'One Box' Universal concept seems to have been replaced with a more user-friendly list with integrated small images within the text results.

Besides, if I really want image driven search I can click on that option. Clean and simple, the way I like it, just as the brilliant Mies van der Rohe said, sometimes 'Less is More.'