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Google unveils universal search May 26, 2007

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May 17th, 2007, Recently at the Searchology event Google gave a sneak preview on what it calls “Universal search”Â

So what is Google Universal search?Â

Its a refinement on it current search results that that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers. SO its essentially an aggregate result viewÂ You can already see the changes on google.com website (see image below), which depending on the results of the search categories it into Maps, Images, web, and presumably books, Note: nothing on the UK site as yet.Â

see categories now just below the search input box)Â
Searches will automatically bring up links to other search optionsÂ

So how does this effect SEO on your website?Â

Its my opinion that it will make natural search for web only, more difficult because you will be competing against more sources in relevance for searches, also less of page 1 will be left for actual website results, more of it will be eaten away by map, image and book results.Â

Personalize?Â Â

The ability to personalize your search is speculation at this point, which could alleviate the potential chaos of results into something meaningful to the searcher, (Im not that interested in maps for example, unless its a holiday destination search or something like that), but it would make sense when you consider what Google are doing with personalized iGoogle homepage themes.Â

Does this mean Google searches differently?Â

Does it rank differently, does the Google search algorithm change?, donâ€™t panic!, I donâ€™t think so, my understanding is the core search algorithm has not changed, its simply an additional algorithm of some sort which reorders the results adding in a mix of other relevant map, images searches into the core search result set.