As you no doubt seen by now, Google today rolled out perhaps its most significant changes to the platform that built it: search.

Running a search on Google now results in their self-dubbed ‘Universal‘ results. This is fancy-speak for getting a blend of results containing not only traditional website links but also pictures, videos, books, news stories, and maps.

In reality most of this functionality has been around for a while, its just that you may or may not have noticed as Google is notorious for testing features one second then taking them down the next.

More significant to me is the Google Toolbar now featured at the top of their sites. While I don’t think it’s the most visually pleasing feature (to me it kind of looks like a top-nav with the CSS turned-off), it is very nice for those of us who use the majority of Google’s services daily.

This too has been around in different variations for a while, but it was always fairly limited in terms of the services it included. Now, thanks to drop-down, it has just about everything you need just one (or two if it’s in the drop down) click away.

I do hope they plan on making this toolbar blend in with their iGoogle skins, it’s really quite ugly now and looked much better before.

On the other side of the aisle, Yahoo has started rolling out their promised Unlimited e-mail to certain users. They say it’ll be months before they roll it out to all of us (I don’t yet know anyone who has it), but nonetheless, it is the kick-off of the ‘unlimited age’.

Google has yet to follow suit with Gmail, but it stands to reason that they will, then some other service will go unlimited, then another, and so on. Sometime in the not-too-distant future we will likely demand that most if not all of our web services provide the comfort and freedom of unlimited storage.

Storage is cheap and getting cheaper, it’s the bandwidth that really needs to improve in this country. When that happens, the possibilities really will be endless.