Google’s universal search

Google announced, and implemented, its move to ‘universal search’ results in the last month, which means that they are now combining all relevant search results into one place. This followed soon after the introduction of personalised search, so what impact will these changes have on search engine optimisation?

Google’s ‘universal search’ results means that the main Google search engine will also display more results from images, videos, maps, news, blogs and other sources, which are related to a particular search, rather than just text content. This has been happening to some extent for several years now, but with Google’s mission to ‘organise the world’s information’ this marks their next big step towards provide relevant search results from all sources.

You can only see the full impact of these changes on Google.com at present and different results tend to appear on searches for people (Kylie Minogue), films (Pirates of the Caribbean) or TV clips (Dead Parrot Sketch) although more differences will be expected to appear as well as a roll-out of the these results to regional versions of Google.

This move is a challenge for Google since they need to provide suitable weighting of search results from different sources ‘ for example, images and video will need to be included in the search algorithm in a different way to pure text content. Google also seems to be moving away from their separate vertical search tools by presenting this information on the main Google search tool, although this is probably a reflection of relatively low user numbers on these other options.

In terms of search engine optimisation we will need to see how the results begin to differ and how widespread any changes may be. Some business sectors will be affected more than others and certainly searches related to local markets will need to ensure coverage in Google Maps (see below). Optimisation of a website should be covering all likely options available on the site anyway, but it also adds new layers to the strategies that may be required to support business rankings in certain markets. Ultimately Google wants to present the best, most relevant, results to users and the challenge for online companies is to continue to take advantage of these opportunities across this potentially broader field.

This announcement by Google follows the previous one about personalised search, whereby users who have a Google login may search and record their results, so that as data on their search history grows, so will the end results begin to differ from the public results seen by other users. There is likely to be limited impact from this option at the moment although the trend to more personalised results will be one that we will need to monitor in the future.

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