This is the fourth (as far as the content is concerned this should actually be number 3½) and last part in the series on Universal Search. It will provide more evaluations and data on the different integration-types.

Maps/Local Yellowpages

As shown in the second part, results from Google's local search are over-proportionally often shown directly at the beginning or at least in the middle of the resultspage. Seeing how they are shown in a large-format map of the respective area, we can assume that the clickrates for these results is quite high. I was all the more astonished when, during the evaluations, I was unable to find a domain that profited strongly from this. Here the top-domains:


Notice anything? At the top of the scale we do not have percent but one-tenth of a percent. The domains that are listed above – and those are the best ones – are only displayed one to three times for ever 1000 hits that are shown for the local search. This becomes a little more apparent when we take a look at the rate of the top-1000 domains for Maps:


Either nobody in Germany has seriously tried their hand at the subject of “optimization for Maps” or Google has control over that issue. Though I do not really believe in the latter – we regularly hear of people in the USA who uploaded a bunch of fake-branches for their flower/hotel/whatever-website. If I were not know for my squeaky clean white-hat-record, this would definitely be something that could interest me ...

Images

At this point I do not wish to anticipate Andre, who will hold a lecture on this at the Campixx this weekend. I will include the results here once the weekend is over.

News

At the moment, Google has two methods to produce the fitting SERPs for current events: for one, they are able to include new sites into the index extremely fast and for the other, they have an integration of Google News through the Universal Search. The following data refer to the integration. Here the top-domains:


Until here we have nothing that surprises, it seems that it is being sorted similarly to Google News. Something that does catch the eye is the fact that there are also some domains from Austria and Switzerland – in Google News they have their own domain. If we take a look at the rate in which the SERPs had a Google News integration, we notice that Google has evidently tightened some screws in mid-January which lead to a much lower integration of this box.

Blogs

The blogsearch should be the freshest entry into the Universal Search. In Germany, I was able to see the first large-scale integration shortly before Christmas. Since then, blogs are shown mainly at the end of the page – it seems that Google is still experimenting with clickrates and “customer satisfaction”. At the moment, it is not worth the effort to do an extra evaluation for the top-domains for the blogsearch as those are mostly populated with the large bloghosters.