What is Google Universal?

Editor’s note

This is a 25 May 2007 explanation of what Google then called ‘Google Universal’. The name and search presentation have changed, and the examples below describe that period rather than today’s results pages. The archive remains useful as a contemporaneous explanation of blended search: web results were beginning to appear alongside news, video, books, and other specialised results.

The original explanation

There had been a lot of buzz about the new ‘Google Universal’ and how it might affect search engine optimisation. To clarify what Google Universal was, I wanted to explain what the service did at the time.

Google had started including results from some of its other sources in the ordinary web results for certain searches. For example, a search for ‘Boston Red Sox’ could show a Google News result among the web listings.

Google Video or Google Books results could appear in the web results too. The practical effect for an SEO campaign was that a results page might contain fewer traditional web listings — in some cases, nine instead of 10.

There was no reason to panic. The basic SEO principle remained the same: a page needed to be relevant to the search. What changed was the set of result types competing for attention on the page.