Universal Search

At SES NY today, the 1:30pm session was focused on Universal Search. The speakers for the discussion were:

• John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO, Federated Media
• James Lamberti, Senior Vice President, Search and Media, comScore, Inc
• Lyndsay Menzies, Managing Director, Big Mouth Media
• Jack Menzel, PM for Universal Search, Google

For those not familiar with the term, Universal Search refers to a blended search results page where Google combines listings from its video, image, local, news (etc.) engines with those it gathers from spidering web pages.

The onstage conversation was the livliest and most engaging I've seen at SES so far. Mr. Battelle was persistent in his attack insistance that the continuing trend toward Universal Search was slowly turning Google (and other search engines) into the destination, rather than the road map. Recently released comScore data supported this theory, showing a 3% lower click-thru rate when Universal Search results are displayed to the searcher.

On the surface, this may seem ideal from a user experience perspective. Getting the searcher to the data they're seeking as quickly as possible is what it's all about, right? And that was the position taken by Mr. Menzel. The situation gets muddy with the realization that Google is also, slowly, becomming a media company. In many Universal Search results, you will find Google Finance for stock quotes and Google Video (YouTube) for funny clips of Chuch Norris. Mr. Battelle pointedly asked Mr. Menzel if Google favored their media properties when presenting Univeral Search results. Naturally, the Google stance is to always show the most relevant results. Of course, "relevancy" is determined by Google's algorithm, which relies on many, many data points of which Google is likely to have the best data for their own properties, so you do the math.

For the thoughtful SEO crowd in the audience, the question is this - What happens when Google becomes the destination? Even if the issue of Google showing more of it's own content on the results pages is put aside, where does it leave the average search marketer if the searcher never leaves the results page? In this scenario, the monetization and ROI of SEO goes right out the window as the user never makes it to the content owner's site.

It's an uncomfortable situation to be in. The entirety of the web allows Google to spider their content with no real guidelines on exactly how much of it can be displayed within a Google property. Would it be going too far for Google to allow a video from Break.com to be played direclty from the search results page? The inclination is to say yes, but wouldn't that also be a better user experience? 

On stage today, Mr. Menzel said several times that Google wanted nothing more than to deliver the searched for information to the user as quickly as possible. Following this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, Google starts to look more and more like a destination. And if that's the case, then we're witnessing the beginnings of a game changer for the SEO world.

Related Posts: Yahoo Semantic Web

Comments

[Luis Pereira]

Nice article. I believe that more and more Google is trying to become a destination site. The winners will be advertisers and Google, and the losers will be content providers and the SEO industry.