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Universal Search: Status Quo

In my last posting, I asked which topics you were interested in. I want to say thank you for the many replies and suggestions – some of them will need some preparation time, while others can be answered rather quickly thanks to the data available to us. One of the these, is the development or rather the status quo of the universal-search-integrations within the Google SERPs. Seeing how my last post on this subject dates back nearly a year, it is time for an update.

We will start by taking a look at the amount of SERPs with universal-search-elements, dating back to the end of 2008:


We can see how the amount has been increasing continuously and has now reached nearly 50% of all searchqueries – if, in addition, you consider how much visibility these boxes will usually get, then you will notice that there will be no way around optimizing content for the different vertical searches. Next, we have an evaluation of the different types of universal-search-integrations:


If we compare this to the beginning of last year, you will notice that the Google image search is now far more integrated. Back then, only about 10% of the universal search boxes were image related, while now, nearly 40 (!) percent of universal-search-integrations hold results from Google Images. To get a better understanding of this jump, here the progress over time of each of the different integrations, again beginning at the end of 2008:


It is clear, that the jump happened at the end of June, the beginning of Juli and that Google has kept including images at this high rate ever since. The amount of videos, maps and news shown has also gone up, while the Google shopping-search has keep at about the same level. The Google-blogsearch-integration on the other hand, has lost some ground. The overall percentages here are a little higher, since there are many keywords for which more than one integration is being shown. The following chart shows the top-10 domains that show up in the image-boxes:


Wordpress.com, which hosts the popular blogsoftware leads the way, followed by Wikimedia.org, which is the Wikipedia's multimedia-service. This diagram shows how Wordpress gained traction alongside the general jump of image-search-integrations, though since then, it has continuously kept on getting stronger:


To show this more vividly, here is a chart with some of the keywords, for which the universal-search-integrations contain pictures from Wordpress.com:


It is not hard to spot how it is not only for the lightly contested longtail (which is also in the mix) but numerous extremely traffic-strong and competitive keywords, for which the Wordpress.com-bloggers have “weaseled” their way onto the first page. So, those of you who are planning on being featured in the image-search, should try to – additionally to your own domain – post the pictures on a Wordpress.com-blog and work on making them accessible by Google. General tips on optimizing for the vertical search can be had from Martin and Andre and there will also be sessions on this topic at the upcoming Campixx.