What I think about Google Universal

Google Universal - it's being pegged as the most major change to search results in years. As both a site owner and an SEO professional what do I think? I think it's barely news at all, and anyone freaking out about it has been missing the point with search engine optimization.

Let's take a step back. For those of you who didn't see the announcement:

The first [announcement] is the launch of universal search results, meaning a query from Google.com will now show results from Google's vertical search engines, including images, videos, news, maps, blogs, and books. Instead of putting these various results in a set position on the page, Google will rank all types of results based on the query. A user will still have the option of segmenting results based on media type, with tabs at the top of the search results for each type.

Anyone who has been paying attention has seen this creeping in for years. Maps from Google Maps showed up when you searched a city, products from Froogle when you searched a product, and images from Google Image search showed up when you searched someone famous. So now Google just took the next logical step and added video, news, blogs, and books to the results.

The webmasters who freaked out were the ones who were bad at SEO. The point of SEO is to optimize a site so that search engines can understand its content and rank it appropriately. It's NOT to trick search engines into ranking you higher than you deserve. And with that, if you continue to have something relevant to a search result (be it a video, a product, or an article) you will rank high. If you don't, you won't.

A search engines job is to give the most relevant result to the user, not cater to your keyword stuffing or algorithm twisting. This update will give people more relevant results than before. As does personalized search. The way that we track an SEO campaign is going to change from "where I rank for a term" to "how much search traffic I received" if it hasn't already, because algorithms that factor in search history, up-to-the second news, and location are going to be too hard to game.

The other thing that's puzzling me is the perception that this is somehow groundbreaking. Normalizing search results from several different sources is nothing new (see Dogpile), and considering Google's pulling all results from their existing searches (news, images, video, etc) it was a matter of testing different coefficients for each that did the appropriate justice. I'm not saying that it's easy to do, just that it's not really that special...nor does Google Universal search change SEO or search very much in my mind. It's just a logical step forward.