Google Universal Search Or Google 2.0… The Future Of Search Engines
This past May, Google talked about the pending launch of their new universal search. Some, like Search Engine guru, Danny Sullivan, called it Google 2.0.
So is this hype or necessity, and where are we at with Google Universal Search?
If you’re still trying to understand what, exactly, Google Universal Search is, you’ve probably already experienced it (and didn’t even know it). Traditionally, all of the searches one does on Google returns text-based results. If you want to do an image, news or other vertical search, you have to select the vertical and work from there. Universal search is the aggregation of all content on the Internet into one universal search page.
So, imagine, I do a search for “Tim Hortons” and I get all of the website mentions along with addresses (from the local vertical of Google), images, press releases, maps, videos and more… all on one centralized page of results. It makes perfect sense. Google agrees, and this is the direction they’re going in.
For instance, lately on searches I’ve done, there have been instances where results from Google Maps or Google Images appear either ahead of the text-based (standard) search results or in between the text results.
Top level, it makes the user experience all the more engaging, but it has dramatic effect on Marketers.
For the past decade-plus Marketers have pushed to optimize their website content and copy for search engines (hence the term SEO – Search Engine Optimization). Now, in a world of tagging , User Generated Content, Blogs, Podcasts, etc… Marketers are being forced to re-look at this strategy and optimize all content (text, images, audio and video) for the Web. It’s a lot more work, and nobody knows how Google’s algorithms will adjust in the coming months and years as search goes from vertical to universal. What we do know is that it is happening, and Marketers need to make sure we’re tagging all of our content properly. Suddenly, everything from the filename of our photos to the ID3 tags on our audio files need to be optimized with core keywords to make sure that when the Google Spider comes by, our content is primed and optimized.
With all of its public gallantry, Google is still very private when it comes to how the search engine works. Marketers are smart (and getting smarter) as to what it takes to make content climb to the top of the organic search results page. The challenge (and question) of universal search will be less about what the content says and more about what type of content it is.
So, what do Marketers need to know about Google Universal Search? Ultimately, you need to sleep at night knowing that if Google decides tomorrow that images should appear ahead of Website content that you’ve done everything you can to make your Marketing collateral findable and likeable to the engine that gets about seventy percent of all searches worldwide.
