When asked what I believe is the most important development in SEO this year, I have to decide between the implementation of Google Caffeine and the massive upgrades to the way the SERPs are shown. While Caffeine will probably take until next year to make full use of all its possibilities, at the moment, the changes in how the results are displayed and structured is the more pressing subject matter. One part of it that is becoming more and more substantial are the integrations of vertical searches into the normal SERPs: Universal Search. With this blogpost, I want to share some data and insights on this matter. Let's start with the amount of SERPs that show at least one Universal-Search-Box integration, beginning at the end of 2008:


Just in time for new-years, we managed to break through the 50%-mark. This means that more than half of all the Google-SERPs we looked at showed at least one form of vertical search integration from Google. When you think of how prominently these integrations are displayed, you will notice that there are many sectors where it has become necessary to optimize for these vertical searchengines. While we are already here, lets take a look at the same analysis, this time sorted for the different industries:


These numbers allow us to grasp two quite interesting things: an industry like Shopping, where Google already offers a competitive product with Google Products, already shows a large amount of integrations in the SERPs. I find it interesting that for Real Estate, Health and Travel, the percentage is still noticeably below average. When (and not if!) Google launches their own products for these industries, I am sure that we will see more and more Universal-Search integrations there, too. Only the erotic-industry seems to be rather safe, as I have not yet heard of “Google Pr0n” being in development. In the next diagram I want to take a broader look and go beyond Germany’s borders: since mid-2010, we also provide Toolbox-Data for Great Britain, Spain, Italy and France, which broadens the available database for such an evaluation (Advertising: these four additional countries will become available next year and will be covered by the 100 Euro per month and module, meaning you get five times the data for the same price as before):


Here we can see that Great Britain already has a much broader integration of the Universal-Search results in their SERPs. When we assume that the British are traditionally rather close to the US-SERPs and will therefore be leading the way, then we should be able to prepare for a further increase in Universal-Search integrations here in Germany, too. In Spain we have similar prevalence as in Germany (which is probably due to it being on the same rung of “Google's evolutionary ladder” as South America, which therefore makes it quite interesting in Google's eyes). Both France and especially Italy are still trailing behind but that will probably even out within the next year. From here, we come to a diagram that shows how strongly the different types of Universal-Search integrations are shown in the SERPs:


The Image-search integration is still leading by quite a large margin. This is not surprising, seeing that more or less suitable pictures can be found for nearly every search-query. Next is the Video-search (with YouTube as strongest “Partner”). Shopping, News and the local-search are next.

A little bit further up I already wrote something about the rather strong presence of the Shopping-integration in the SERPs. In the beginning, Google only linked to shops that were in Google Base, then they slowly developed their own product and took their time to implement it (documented here in an older posting). Though now it looks a little different, which we can see in the following diagram. It shows the chronological sequence of the amount of Shopping-Universal-Search integrations for which Google solely shows their own “Google Shopping” product in the SERPs:


Launched in March of 2009, the amount of integrations leveled out at between 6 and 12 percent. Meanwhile, Google took over many “high traffic” keywords and showed only their own shopping-links: things like “apple iphone” or “mp3 player” have been under Google's control for a long time. A few weeks ago, this control saw a major leap. Now we have exclusive links to Google Shopping for about 20% of all Shopping-integrations. I am sure it was just a coincidence that this step was taken so close to Christmas.