Ok, let's do a real quick recap of what Google's new Universal Search is and what it means to us?
- Universal Search takes a query and pulls results from Google vertical search properties (news, video, images, local and books as) well as from the normal web search, blends them all together (if appropriate), and presents them within the top 10 for a user's web search.
- You won't see this for every search, as not every search will have results from news, video, images, local and books that Google thinks are important enough to disrupt the normal web results.
- For those searches that do get results pulled from the vertical searches, the disruption in the top 10 results could be huge.
- If you have top 10 results, you may see those disappear.
So, what does it mean for us? Figure out how to be the most relevant return for a search, whether it's from the "web" or from news, video, images, local or books. Your job just got a little more complicated.