Universal, Blended & Vertical Search Are The New White

OK so I’m a slow typer! This is just a quick write up of another great session I attended at SES London.

Following on from his solo performance at SMX Stockholm, Google’s Adam Lasnik again took the stage for the Universal, Blended & Vertical Search session ably accompanied by Andrew Goodman from Page Zero Media, Mike Grehan and Jeff Revoy from Yahoo!

Kevin Ryan kicked us off by explaining that these new type of search engine results were seeing higher CTRs, with fewer users clicking through to the second page. Having images, video and news results populating the page was doing away with the “10 blue link” phenomena, making it harder for search marketers to use traditional methods to drive traffic to their sites.

Not being backward in coming forward, Kevin came straight out and asked whether there was an inherent bias towards YouTube or FlickR results appearing in Google and Yahoo! respectively.

Mike thought there was simply more of a richer experience for users with Andrew saying that in 3-4 years there’d be more and more of an emphasis on in-house properties featuring more and more in the SERPs. Both G & Y! said there was no bias but in Google’s case we’re not surprised YT gets more of a look-in as they have huge database of video to choose from.

So are site-builders thinking about universal search when they start designing their sites? The consensus was this new angle was filtering through, but that site-owners still need to get the basics right and struggle to get the content they have indexed.

As far as G were concerned all queries do pass through a universal search filter but results depend on the query. If the query lends itself to a visual result then it will appear. Y!’s approach to pretty much the whole session was one of relevancy. If relevant to a particular query, then a blended result would show.

Then Adam then mentioned something about chocolate – but I can’t read my notes………so will move on 🙂

When asked about how decisions are made regarding the display of results, Adam again (as he did at SMX Stockholm) explained he’s a “search quality guy” and nowt to do with ads! Decisions are made on a query by query basis and there were no plans that he knew of to display universal search ads on a paid basis.

Social Search was touched on just as the guys on the analytics panel had discussed earlier. Is it a new breed of spam? How do you measure a conversation? Can we take it too far or are we still hooked on the direct response metric?

Jeff said it depended on how you filter the data, you need to ask questions of the conversation depending on its context.

Is social search adding value? Well Andrew said you’re going to get a lot of junk, so users need help to filter down to the “wisdom” of the individual. He then touched on personalisation, using past data to determine what a user might be most interested in.

So how is this going to happen? Through a secret sauce, experimentation, Google surveys 1% of users, we’re still on a journey (!). Andrew wanted “more openness, more inclusion.” Mike wants to see more video from different sources, although Adam was quick to point out that before Google bought YouTube the videos stayed on the site and were not “syndicated” via search.

SuperGuru Tips:

• Mike – get ready to change
• Andrew – be local, be social
• Adam – create compelling content
• Jeff – be relevant

There’s no doubt that these kind of results are just the tip of the iceberg and how we’ll see search providers display results in the future. We’ve all been dipping the toe in and experimenting – check out what Live Search thinks of Amy Winehouse!

The businesses that are savvy and get into the rich, indexable content game will see great early results. But you don’t have to be a big business either. If you’re a “builder in Richmond” I’d love to find a search result showing a short video of you showing off your recent work. Any £50 digital camera can take a half-decent video these days, so put down that cup of sweet tea and get shooting.