An Insider's View of Universal Search

[tedster]

David Bailey, head of Google's Universal Search team, has an article on SearchEngineLand clarifying Google's Universal Search. He gives a very clear presentation, and also puts me in awe of the technical achievement this represents - even in its present form. And as he promises in the article:

Currently, this architectural transition is far enough along to be a proven success but it is by no means complete, and more importantly we've only begun to tap the potential improvements in relevance and page layout that it enables. The upshot for users is that you should expect a lot more changes and more aggressive presentation of more verticals in the months ahead.

[searchengineland.com...]

[jimbeetle]

Yeah, very interesting article. That "more aggressive presentation of more verticals in the months ahead" started sounding alarm bells (wake-up calls?) in my head.

[julinho]

I am already seeing a significant impact.

E.g., rigth now, for [a large American city in the East coast], the #1 is maps.google, and the #2 is news.google. Some people must have felt a drop in traffic, and will feel much more when Google decide to place one or two Youtube videos on the first page.
As wikipedia has one or two spots secured for nearly every term, the rest of us will be fighting for the four or five spots left.

Off-topic: I found this sentence interesting, when the author was mentioning the Bigtable query: "it's just too far down the long tail to learn much from user behavior."

[Miamacs]

OK how about this...

Once all first pages will have a near identical structure,
many people will start clicking that 2nd page link by default.

Actually the last few times I mentioned what I do to people, and we discussed how important SE rankings can be to a business, within the same discussion it became evident that more and more are doing so already: Going for the 2nd page, even the 3rd.

...

Universal search caters for the 'google-holic' crowd, browsing out of boredom and generic curiosity. If you want to find something specific, it won't help you if they hand pick what they think is best. A "Show me matches, I'll choose for myself"... kinda audience is emerging right now. Or better put, this class of users is not limited to regular surfers anymore.

[potentialgeek]

Love the silent inadvertent rebellion. I think I'll try it myself. Thanks for the idea.

p/g

[outland88]

Google is literally flooding my areas with this universal search. I would say 60% of sites now ranking in my areas are new Google forced results.

Under one popular keyword search in my areas Google completely changed 7 of the top 10 results twice last week. On Saturday they actually changed what was ranked for the keyword phrase twice in a day.

Also if I were to take just the first 50 domain names on most popular keyword searches in my areas now I guarantee nobody would associate the keyword or phrase being searched for with the domain. I’m not saying the domain has to have the keyword in it. All I’m saying is that in the past particular domains could be identified with the keyword search such as hypothetically tire planet for tires. Now you get Wiki, LuLu’s blog, channel 5 news, encyclopedia b, Google books, You Tube, plus a myriad of other domains definitely not associated with the areas I’m in. As I said three months ago I believe Universal search will be a continuos churn and manipulation of the results in many areas. May be great for those who don’t derive an income from the Internet but I don’t know whether Adwords will ever deliver the punch for small business that some well-ranked pages will.

It’s almost if they’re running multiple algos now and reserving particular positions in the rankings for sites from each of them.

[Tonearm]

I wonder if Google wants to fill up the first page with these monotonous results so searchers are more likely to click on AdWords ads for the real stuff.