Google has unveiled a universal search feature that integrates results from news stories, books, video, local search and images.

Universal search will allow users to dispense with the need to visit Google’s specialised search engines, such as Google Book Search .

A player embedded in the search results page will let users view YouTube footage. Although the site will link to videos on other websites, the embedded player will not show them.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin touted universal search as the first big pay-off from its YouTube acquisition.

The service will also offer data from Google’s book search, local search, news stories and image search services.

The company said that “hundreds” of engineers had been working on the project for two years.

Google has designed algorithms to ensure the five new sources it has added for search queries do not quintuple load on its servers. The company ended up designing a new search infrastructure and ranking algorithms to determine the order in which results are ranked, which it said had eliminated the extra workload associated with introducing more content.

Google also unveiled a contextual search feature that lets users narrow down their query to a specific category based on the query itself.

A query for “downtown Los Angeles”, for instance, will dive deep into images, news and maps as well as plain web results. A search for “Python scripting language” finds blog items, book links, discussion groups and code snippets.

“We ultimately see a real advance in the information presented to the user,” said Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search products and user experience at G oogle.