The Importance of Google Universal Search

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On May 16, 2007, Google announced the beginning of universal search:

Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites into a single set of results. At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users will recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results as the company advances toward delivering a truly comprehensive search experience.

Since then, Google has worked to expand the role of universal search in many ways.  The importance of universal search in SEO simply cannot be overstated, and it is only likely to become more important in the future.

What is Universal Search?

People often don’t realize that Google actually has a number of search engines: blogs, books, video, etc.  These are known as “vertical” search engines.  As Danny Sullivan puts it:

Regular search – when you go to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask or any general-purpose search engine – is a “horizontal” search in that you are searching across a wide spectrum of material. Information from sports sites, news sites, medical sites, shopping sites – the entire horizontal spectrum of topics is represented.

With vertical search, you slice down vertically through one topic area. You search only against the news sites or against the medical information, for example. This type of focus can make for more relevant results.

In many ways, a regular Google search was always “universal” in that it contains much of the same information, they key differences are the way the information is ranked and the manner it is displayed.  Traditional search is ranked by backlinks and on-site factors that show relevance to the query, vertical searches have a whole set of other factors such as price (for products) or newness (for news).  On the display side, you will always see a list of web page titles and descriptions for traditional search, while with verticals this would not always make sense (think images).

Universal search takes the traditional search results and adds in the vertical results.  This has taken on many forms, from the traditional OneBox at the top of the search results page, to expanded OneBoxes and blended results.  Over time, Google has been adding the number of universal results as well as the frequency.

For example, at the time of this writing, if I do a search for chicago seo I see a results page dominated by a map with 10 local listings, and then 10 regular results with an additional news listing blended in.

Categories of Google Vertical Search Engines:

1. Web Search
2. Local Search (Maps)
3. Product Search
4. Google News
5. Video Search
6. Image Search
7. Blog Search
8. Book Search
9. Patent Search
10. Scholar Search

And I am sure there are plenty more in various stages of development and use.  The categories on Google Base might give some clues as to what is in the pipes.

Impact on Search Marketing:

Blended results began as mostly subtractive, meaning they “bumped” a natural search result off of the page they were on, keeping the total results at ten.  Today blended universal results are additive, meaning there are always ten natural results with the addition of whichever universal results are deemed worthy.

Even with the additive results, many internet marketers are understandably upset.  Overnight, you may see your very good and hard fought #3 ranking turn into the equivalent of a #6 ranking, or even worse.

While you may not particularly like these changes, a smart marketer will adapt to realities instead of rallying against what we can’t control. The good news is that Google universal search offers quite a few opportunities to large and small organizations (and individuals) who use them effectively.

1. The first thing to remember is that the verticals themselves are often used directly.  This number may be tiny compared to regular search, but still significant enough to be worth the effort.
2. Because the verticals are often evaluated quite differently, a website with significantly less resources and exposure can often achieve the equivalent of a “first page” ranking in the SERPs, bypassing extremely competitive areas.
3. There are opportunities to literally dominate results pages.  It wouldn’t be unheard of to have a double regular listing, an Adwords listing, and one or two extras from universal results.  Add in a site-wide listing and a sub domain or two and, well, you see where I am going…

How to get Indexed in Verticals:

Over the next few weeks, I will be detailing how to get indexed in vertical search engines as well as exploring the best ways to improve rankings in each.