Google Universal Search to integrate news sites, blogs
on SERPs
And might screw a lot of SEOs and web publishers in the
process!
20 May 2007 Google, world's most popular search engine,
is revamping its search format. The revamped format will be
such that the search will return not only the results from
the webpages, but also those from blogs, news sites, video
services and other places, where the relevant information is
present. Till now, one had to deliberately make a choice.
You had to click on the News tab to do a News search, Images
tab to search for images and Video tab to search for videos.
However, now Google will, as they see fit, include those
search results into the regular search result pages.
Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user
experience, said, "It's breaking down the silos of
information that have been built up. It's a broad, long-term
vision that will unfold over the next few years."
The tabs which will appear on the search page between the
results and search box, will as they do currently, guide the
users to blogs and news specific searches.
The changes will initially be done only on Google.com in
English. Opinion is divided on how much Universal Search
would benefit actual searchers. Google seems to be of the
opinion that bringing all kinds of search results on the
normal search results pages is a good thing. However, this
is bad news for search engine optimizers (SEOs), search
engine marketers and those website publishers who rely
heavily on ranking well in Google. For them, a Google Video
or Youtube result, or a news result, effectively means one
less slot to compete for in the SERPs.
Things don't look too good from the SEO point of view,
however. Most searchers tend to not go beyond the first ten
results on the first page that Google throws up. So if a
site gets pushed to the second page due to the addition of a
News or Video result, it could effectively mean major loss
of traffic. Some hope that Universal Search will drive
away searchers from Google over a period and that might
force Google to retreat from this.
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