Enter Universal Search
Big news in search engine marketing last week as Google unveiled their new search engine results format which they call “universal search”.
Their aim is to combine traditional search results (those compiled from text web pages) with results from their other search properties including Google News, YouTube, Google Images, and their literary search engine for books. The result is a set of search results that contains links not only to web pages but to news stories, book excerpts, and YouTube videos.
It remains to be seen how the metrics for each of these different types of media are going to be compared to each other to determine relevance but it’s clear that the future of Google’s search results involves moving toward multimedia search.
My first thought is that, with the increased clutter of the organic results, the importance of paid results (AdWords) will only increase. After all, that will be the only way to ensure front page ranking.
Second is the need for search marketing professionals to understand how to rank video, news, images, and book excerpts for their clients. The methods for optimizing and ranking web page text are well known and fairly standard but the best methods for ranking these other media types remain to be discovered.
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