Recap of ‘Universal and Blended Search’ - SES San Jose 2007

Greg Jarboe of SEO PR led this session off, calling Google Universal Search ‘the biggest shift in the SEO industry since the Google Florida update of 2003.’ News stories, videos, local maps, and even blog posts are now appearing inline with everyday ‘Web’ results on a number of Google SERPs. News publishers are particularly affected by this shift: it’s now absolutely critical to optimize press releases and include an image for maximum inclusion in a Universal SERP.

Sherwood Stranieri of Catalyst Online was up next, with a fascinating look at how Video results in particular are ranked and blended within a Universal SERP. The number of people who’ve viewed a video, and the number of comments those viewers have made, are the most important factors in determining where a video will rank. BUT, traditional SEO factors like tagging, PageRank, and number of inbound links to a particular video can compensate somewhat for a less-robust social profile. Google’s ‘Hot Trends‘ can give some clues as to what kinds of searches video & news are likely to appear on. Currently, though, you’d better submit ANY video you have to YouTube, MetaCafe, or similarly reputed sites of that ilk, because Google hasn’t made a deep effort at pulling videos (and corresponding data about them) from lesser-known sites when it comes to integration with Universal results.

One of my favorite bloggers, Bill Slawski of SEO-by-the-Sea and Commerce360, was up next. Bill’s presentation focused on a concept Google’s algorithm uses when figuring out which searches should display Univeral results. He called this an information ‘triple,’ based on the parameters of user, query, and repository (video, images, blogs, news, local, etc.). If historical data for a particular query or user location shows a preference for a particular repository, there’s a high likelihood that those results will be shown inline on a Universal SERP. Bill also mentioned that there are particular robots in Google’s arsenal called ‘janitors’ which attempt to clean up and standardize particular kinds of data that the Googlebot pulls from websites like phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth, and more. Formatting your HTML in a consistent fashion can increase the chances that these are pulled properly and might be integrated with Universal.

David Bailey of Google was up next & shared some juicy insights into the basis behind Universal.  Contrary to what some in the Blogosphere have speculated, it’s not all about showing Google properties like YouTube and Google News…the end goal is to present users with all relevant information to a particular query on a single page.  On the technical end, any given query entered into OneBox by a user is actually passed to ALL of Google’s repositories, at which point each one passes the main “nerve center” (my word, not David’s) relevant answers from its own index.  Each of the repositories’ responses is then ranked within the set of Universal results based on a number of factors that contribute to its relevance (some of which I discussed above already) to the query.  All of this happens in microseconds, of course!

Tim Mayer of Yahoo followed up David’s presentation with an interesting commentary about the goal of SERPs: no longer is the idea of a search engine to propel visitors to the most relevant WEBSITE in as few clicks as possible, it’s to give visitors the information they’re seeking in as few clicks as possible.  Often this means visitors never even have to navigate off the SERP, when it comes to movie showtimes, playing new songs by a particular artist, or finding out contact information for a local business.  Yahoo is particularly interested in including reviews in blended results, which have received positive feedback from testing they’ve done.

Erik Collier of Ask, the final panelist of this session, completed the discussion by commenting that since Ask launched its ‘Ask 3D’ in June, they’ve seen a 30% drop in users navigating to a second SERP and a 15% drop in users who perform secondary or tertiary searches.  Ask has a little bit different strategy in presenting its blended results, preferring to segment them into sections rather than display them inline.

In the Q&A, both David Bailey and Tim Mayer hinted that a video feed submission portal was on its way for smaller enterprises to submit their videos for possible inclusion into Universal, but for now, the best thing is to submit to larger distributors like YouTube (which increase the potential for a larger audience anyway).  For now, all of the engines are concerned about quality-of-experience from smaller sites without standardized web hosting metrics and player adoption.  If you still want to retain the traffic to your own website, just release a “teaser” on one of the larger distribution outlets with a link to your site for the full version.