Today I noticed that it has been way too long since the last article on this blog that dealt with Universal Search. Therefore it is time for me to adopt that topic again. Universal Search originated from the idea that it would be nice to show vertical searchengines, like those for products or blogs, directly in the normal SERPs if they are useful or on demand. Thanks to this you make it obsolete for the searcher to take the extra step of using a special-searchengine (which is not often done) and (in theory) the quality of your results improves. In the beginning, Universal Search could be primarily found in the USA but for a while now, you can also gaze upon its full beauty here in Germany. As we can see on the screenshot to the right, a search for “Barack Obama” will already display various different informations like News-reports, videos but also blogpostings that Universal Search has found on the topic.

To make a prediction about the prevalence of Universal Search in the Google SERPs without having to resort to felt values, I checked more than 1 million SERPs for Universal Search elements. It emerged that about 17 percent of all Google-SERPs already have one or more integrations.


An interesting question that arises is which keywords have the Universal Search integration? For this, I divided the keywords into five different traffic-categories: starting with very traffic-strong keywords like “Routenplaner” ( route planner) and ending with the extreme long-tail. I then ran the above test again, this time for each individual category.


As you can see, 30 percent of all SERPs for extremely traffic-strong keywords show an integration of Universal Search-elements. The less traffic the keyword produces, the smaller the amount will be up until 14 percent for the long-tail-area; this equates to more than a 50% drop in comparison with the first traffic-category. The first conclusion this leads us to is that, at the moment, Universal Search is more interesting if you are optimizing for areas that are rather traffic heavy rather than if you are working on the long-tail.

Another thing that I was curious about was the question of how this rate has developed throughout the last few weeks and month? For this, I took as many calendar weeks as I could still count off on the fingers of both of my hands and threw the rate of SERPs with Universal Search into the following diagram:


It can be nicely seen how, in these 10 weeks, the rate of SERPs with at least one integration of Universal Search-content has risen from 14 to 17 percent. When we go further back through the “Google-past” we will see that this trend keeps going. The second conclusion on this topic is the one that Universal Search is becoming ever more present and therefore also increasingly important.

Seeing how this blogposting would have gotten somewhat long if I had put all evaluations and diagrams into one posting, I decided to make this a multi-part series. The second part will have data on what content is actually being integrated through the Universal Search.