Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

Universal Search is still one of those buzz words that keeps coming up within the world of search. By now, many of you probably know that Universal Search refers to search results that blend videos, images, news, local listings and more. Each of the major search engines are taking a stab at their own interpretation of Universal Search. From an online marketing perspective, Universal Search presents many new opportunities to explore and learn what works best in each platform for a site.

• Ask.com is a good example of using universal search in an attempt to differentiate themselves. If you search for a musician, there are more interactive options instead of just the search results listed. You can view images, popular tracks, videos or news. You can even narrow/expand your search or find a related search with provided suggestions. You can even search specifically for blogs, cities, maps and directions or shopping.

• Yahoo’s format is similar to Ask, but does not appear to be quite as ‘universal’ in its broad results. You can narrow your search by category - images, video, local, shopping, answers, audio, directory, jobs or news. Again, using the example of a musician search, you can see that they have the Web results and music samples, but that’s about it.

• Google has taken its own approach to universal search by having many categories to get more accurate results. It seems to keep adding to its list of search topics which currently includes images, maps, news, shopping, videos, groups, books, scholar, finance and blogs. You can also search Google’s applications such as YouTube, Picasa photos, calendars (personal or public), your Google documents or your Google reader bookmark feeds. Using the same Google lists image results at the top and incorporates the other forms into the results when simply searching the Web. There are video results within the Web results.

• The fourth big player, MSN, leans back towards a simple format. They include images at the top of the Web results, like Google and offer specific searches for images, videos, news, maps, classifieds, local, academics, books, feeds, health, Q&A and Spaces (MSN member profiles). Its search for a musician again looks similar.

Even though each engine has many similarities at this point, each has unique qualities that certain users may appreciate. It has been proven that most users are loyal to a specific search engine, but you really should check out all four before deciding which search engine is your favorite.

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