In the beginning only active in the USA, we are slowly getting the different increments of the Google Universal Search in Europe – high time to take a closer look at this matter. The term “Universal Search” is used by Google to dub the combination of a long list of changes to the SERPs as well as the underlying technology which has the potential to breeze fresh wind into the searchresults which are rather rigid at the moment.

For a while now, Google is collecting considerably more information from websites than just textual content. The past has already often seen the use of a so called “Onebox” above the results which displays supposedly pertinent pictures, stock prices or the current weather report. While in the past this only happened if Google assumed that these informations were useful to the user. Universal Search is taking this one step further by including the following formats into the ranking besides “normal” websites: news, yellow pages data including maps, videos and scanned books from Google Books. The basic idea behind this is that these data can be used to build beautiful, specific vertical searches, which are used very sparsely because they are unknown. Besides the actual index Google will now query more of the above mentioned databases depending on the assumed intent of the searchquery. If it finds something relevant there, Google will try to build a ranking with all the congregated data and show SERPs with extended information.

Google is keeping the basic and adequately known layout of the SERPs and is trying to elegantly integrate the respective hits by type. For news and videos there are small preview pictures and hits from the Google yellow pages sometimes sport an integration with Google Maps. It is save to assume that Google will keep experimenting with different variations of the user-interface in the future and that they will also try out other integrations. So what are the consequences of these changes for the optimization? Even though there are not yet any reliable numbers present, we can assume that the clickrate in the SERPs will change considerably. While the clickrate quickly sank with rising positions in the “conventional”, textbased SERPs, the inclusion of previews and complete videos will grab the attention of users, which will result in a decent clickrate even for results that are further in the back. In the future, the meaningful integration of media such as pictures and videos will be present more strongly in a searchengineoptimizers tasks than it is now.