As most blogs breathed a sign of relief that Google did not go out of business in Q1 from the slowing economy, my favorite "Terminator" fan, Sergey Brin, divulged some information on the success of Universal Search:
In the past year we have deployed Universal Search. Since we launched it, we were able to double the number of queries where when it takes over, in especially images, maps and books.
What is Universal Search? Last year, Google innocuously released it on Google.com. Most people are unfamiliar with Universal Search, but it is the basic concept (but complex execution) of retrieving search results from other repositories of information from one query.
See it for yourself on "darth vader." Within the search engine results page, you can see images, video, news archives, and related searches. While this may seem trivial, I knew that this would have some positive effects as from experience I know that users do not click on the tabs above the search box (Images, News, Shopping, etc). People want to type one word into a search box and get "all" relevant content as if by magic. At least the goal is clear!
What are the effects? Well, as Sergey said, it has doubled the usage of images, maps, and books. Google has proved, for the first time, that by bringing valuable content onto the main search engine results page, information gets consumed. While this may seem like common sense, it is has been nearly impossible to achieve through a wide variety of boring math reasons. Yet, business spend millions of dollars on content that their users don't leverage, why? Just as on Google, people will not search separate collections. This may be annoying to information professionals, and the "classic" enterprise approaches for fixing it has been very expensive.
The Universal Search Business Effects
Let's tackle public facing web sites first. According to Robert Keating, the general manager at DMOZ, the open directory that serves as the seedlist for the major commercial search engines,
We have entered a post page rank world. As Google integrates more content from other information sources, the importance of pagerank will diminish. Search Engine Optimization firms will have to focus on publishing content into different formats and distributing it across the Internet as opposed to only worrying about getting some links.
Bob knows quite a bit about SEO and how, as an industry, SEO firms will simply register sites to DMOZ to improve rankings even though it is free and easy to do on your own.
Post Page Rank World? I will officially steal that in my future meetings. I have to agree that search engine optimization (SEO) is about to get turned on its head, especially given the massive amount of SEO, SEM, ad agencies, etc. that know very little about how the world is shifting. Universal Search Optimization (USO) is probably a better term because unless your site appears 1,2,or 3 at the top of Google, then the only chance that you have for anyone to find you is to have images, video, and news feeds that could appear on the search engine results page (SERP) real estate.
In a post page rank world, content distribution is king. Plus, with proper content distribution, your page rank will follow. While Adhere has done this type of consulting, we did not have a name for it. Let's see if Universal Search Optimization sticks.
On to the enterprise, where the concept of Universal Search has been a Holy Grail, this is not good news for enterprise search vendors. Google has proven that when you integrate content into one results page, the use of that content increases. The amount of people in an organizations that leverage search systems and internal information is laughably low and very unproductive. Google has provided the answer.
Google's Universal Search technology is founded in federating and integrating results. Most enterprise search companies run away from federated search because the more content that they can gobble up, the more money they make. Admittedly, I have been selling the idea of a GSA plus federated products for a while, but now I am excited to have evidence about the increased usage.
To be clear: A Google Search Appliance with federated technology will increase usage of other valuable systems that sit unused. Let your employees use the information from EBSCO, Hoovers, Lexus, etc. to make them more efficient. Best of all, this approach will save time and money compared to typical enterprise software deployments.
A Post Page Rank World indeed.
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