While the first part in this series on Universal Search was about how widespread the integration in the normal SERPs already is, this part will be about the integrations themselves. At the moment, I can observe mostly integrations for these kinds of data: Google Products (formerly known as Base), videos, Google Maps, picture search, news and blogs. With the same data basis that was used in the first part (about 1 million primarily German keywords), I took a look at how often the different integrations occurred:


I would not have reckoned that the product search was so far ahead – seeing how I notice integrations such as picture- or video-search notably more often. The integration of the blogsearch is still rather weak but it is also quite fresh in the German SERPs. As far as news are concerned, I would have banked on a higher percentage.

Next, I looked at the placement of the Universal Search within the results. The times in which Google could just conjure a so-called “Onebox” onto the beginning of the page are over for a while already. Still, for a results-page with 10 results there are basically tree possible positions: at the beginning of the results, in the middle and at the end. The following evaluation shows how the positions of the individual elements are allocated:


The results coincide closely to my own impressions. While the local search from Google Maps will mainly be displayed at the beginning of the page, you will notice that the blogsearch is nearly exclusively confined to the end, which is the area that is noticed the least.

To show that the integration of Universal Search elements is still happening very dynamically at the moment and that Google is apparently trying out many different possibilities and ideas, I took the first diagram, which showed the distribution of the different types, and unrolled it to 10 weeks:



The video- and map-integrations are continuously at about the same level. Since mid-January, the product-search is being integrated much more strongly while Google News integrations are becoming more scarce. During the last few weeks the image-search also became stronger again, in this case, Google changed from an integration with two pictures to one with four while at the same time increasing the number of times those integrations are shown (before / after

Johannes Beus - on Sat (02/28/2009) at 11:00 AM