How will Google’s Universal Search Affect You?

Google is soon unveiling a new era in searching. It’s called universal search.

What it is, in a nutshell, is the best of all results captured on a single page, whether the result is a web page, a video, a press release, a news item, etc.. You can read more about it here on the official Google blog.

It should be welcome news to searchers, and not so welcome news to Internet Marketers. A page that would have been in the top spots in the past will most likely be pushed down the results. For example, if your page was #4 in normal results, now you will not only be behind the first 3 results, but a couple videos, a couple news feeds, a few images, etc., so that there’s a chance you would be pushed to the 2nd page of search results.

How that will affect search engine optimization is too early to tell, but there’s a good chance that it will cause more competition for paid ads to regain lost position on the first page. Good for Google. Good for Google shareholders. Good for searchers. Not so good for web developers.

Ten years ago, even 5 years ago, who would have imagined that searching for something would be such a big business, and so complicated?