Google Blended/Universal Search One Year Later

Google’s acquisition of YouTube in October of 2006 really opened the doors for Internet Video. The next big event regarding video search came 7 months later when Google introduced Universal Search into the marketplace. The goal of universal search is to create a better user experience with blended search results including: images, video, and news for example. Here you can see a universal search example for a plastic surgeon in Charlotte under the search term “Mommy Makeover Charlotte”.

Now you can see here that not only has the plastic surgeons website indexed (empowermd.com) but his videos associated with Mommy Makeover Charlotte have also been indexed as well. What is interesting here is the time it took for the videos to pop up under this search term. Normally websites can take a considerable amount of time to pop up on the front page but I have seen videos pop up with in one day or sometimes hours. Video optimization is now a big part of general search and moves at a very fast pace. In addition to acquiring more placement under very competitive search terms Video optimization is a great way to help out your traditional SEO because of the back link that is associated with the Video channel like our YouTube example below.

In closing it seems as if Google is giving Video content an advantage when it comes to blended search and it is not going get any easier obtaining search engine placement with just a static website. Video is here to stay and there are some great early market share opportunities.