In May 2007, Google announced the launch of a number of new search attributes jointly known as ‘Universal Search’. A key element of that launching was to more often and more profoundly mix search results with outcomes from news, local business listings, scanned books, products, and videos. As a matter of fact, those introductions were simply one landmark in an unending operation of enhancing the search experience of web surfers by exploring through all kinds of content and assigning a rank to them in an unified manner.
During the initial 5 years, Google had been generating many different search engines that were optimized for diverse kinds of content. These comprise web search (this is the most common one), and other searches related to news, blog, video, images, local or maps and products. Nevertheless, since the middle part of 2007, Google has begun to mix the results from all these aforesaid engines into their major online search results. As mentioned earlier, this phenomenon is called the Universal Search and the improved search engine result pages (SERPs) are known as ‘blended search results’.
According to Google, this novel approach is producing the desired effects and has been quickly elevating the number of searches that consist of blended results. As stated by a survey, 17 percent of Google searches contained blended results in March 2008. By November 2008, the figure had gone up to 31 percent. The rest of prominent search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Ask are presently imitating this process.
Here, the bad piece of news is your search engine marketing (SEM) or search engine optimization (SEO) tasks would get more complex. The good piece of news is a very small number of promoters or online business owners interpret what is taking place with search; therefore, there is a genuine chance to get a first-entry advantage. If you realize what Google admits in search outcomes like images, videos, news, maps, etc and optimize all these elements on your webpages, you can bring more and more pages on SERPs, leading to more relevant traffic.
If you go through numerous blogs and forums pertaining to this trade, you are left with the belief that web promoters are of the opinion that not many individuals opt for the blended content, so there is no urgent requirement to optimize images, videos and news. But, a recent research revealed some staggering facts that proved the opinion of promoters very wrong.
The research showed that search engine users make use of the specific content lists (videos, maps, images, news, etc.) within blended search results more frequently than they use specific content that they have been come across through the dedicated search engine, for instance Google News Search. Hence, when listings within blended SERPs get clicked so frequently, it would be certainly beneficial to invest time in getting listed.
In the end, the objective of each web promoter should be to bring their webpages on the first page of the SERPs since the research revealed that 68 percent of users click listings on the beginning page of results and a petite 8 percent go beyond third page. Google Universal Search and Blended Results allow you the chance to obtain first-page listings for a bunch of new keywords to outperform your competitors.
