Google Launches “Universal Search” & Blended Results
Google Launches “Universal Search” & Blended Results
A guide to Google: Origins, history and key moments in search
Google is the most popular search engine in the world, with a commanding market share of over 80% globally and just under 80% in the U.S.
While we don’t have any figures direct from the company, it’s estimated that billions of searches – or trillions per year – are conducted on Google.
Google’s immense popularity makes it an essential platform for brands and businesses that want to be visible and found by their target audiences when people are searching for products they sell or topics they have deep expertise and experience in.
This can be achieved with search marketing – organically, by following SEO best practices, via paid advertising (PPC), or in combination.
A brief history of Google
It’s hard to imagine a time before Google dominated search. Google is a household name synonymous with search.
But back in the late 1990s, the search engine landscape was totally different.
At the time, Yahoo was the biggest player in search, but there were several other search engines including Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves.
But before Google would change search and marketing forever, there was BackRub.
This was the name of the search engine two Stanford PhD students – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – started developing in 1996.
The name “Backrub” came from how the search engine analyzed “backlinks” pointing to websites to understand their importance for ranking purposes.
Page and Brin assembled Backrub using leased servers and parts they bought at discounted prices. It operated on Stanford’s network for over a year, eventually processing around 10,000 queries a day.
While primitive compared to today’s Google, Backrub introduced concepts like link analysis for relevance ranking. It laid the foundation for Page and Brin’s breakthrough PageRank algorithm, which became the core of Google’s Search.
Soon after, Page and Brin decided the name wasn’t a winner and started brainstorming. In 1997, they renamed their fledgling search engine to “Google” (thanks in part to a typo while searching for available domain names). Google.com was then registered on Sept 15, 1997.
While other search engines relied on counting how many times keywords were used on pages for ranking, Google introduced its PageRank algorithm. This looked at how many other sites linked to a page as a way to gauge its importance.
The Google homepage launched in 1998 with a basic, uncluttered interface showing just a “Google!” logo, search bar and Search button.
Within a few years, Google search results would win over users due to far better relevancy. It wasn’t long before Google became the most popular search engine and further increased its global dominance in search over the coming decades.
Google overview
- Founded: Sept. 4, 1998
- Founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin
- CEO: Sundar Pichai
- 2022 revenue: $282.8 billion
- Full-time employees: 181,798
- Official birthday: Sept. 27 (since 2005)
Timeline: Google Search key moments
Google Launches “Universal Search” & Blended Results
Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a “Universal Search” system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local, and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.
The new system officially rolls out today for anyone using Google.com and searching in English. Not everyone will see it at first, but for the next several days, Universal Search should be more, well, universal.
A new navigational interface has also been unveiled for Google and is covered more in the companion piece to this article, Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide.
The move potentially should be a huge boon for searchers, while search marketers who have paid attention to the importance of specialized or vertical search will see new opportunities.
To fully explain the importance to both groups, I’m going to work step-by-step through the concept of vertical search engines, how they’re often ignored by searchers and search marketers alike, then how Google is going to make this content more visible through Universal Search.
As this is a long article, here are jumps to specific sections, should you wish to skip ahead:
What The Hell Is Vertical Search?
I hate the term vertical search. I routinely ask audiences if they understand what it means, and significant numbers don’t. I prefer the term specialized search or specialty search, but the financial community in particular has popularized the use of “vertical” search. Let me explain the concept.
Regular search — when you go to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask or any general-purpose search engine — is a “horizontal” search in that you are searching across a wide spectrum of material. Information from sports sites, news sites, medical sites, shopping sites — the entire horizontal spectrum of topics is represented.
With vertical search, you slice down vertically through one topic area. You search only against the news sites or against the medical information, for example. This type of focus can make for more relevant results.
Need help on fixing windows in your house? Search on that horizontally, and information about the Windows operating system might dominate the listings, simply because there’s so much about Windows out there.
Try using a vertical search engine that only has home improvement information, and information about repairing the type of windows you look out of should become much more visible and relevant.
Making Vertical Search Visible
Sadly, many people are unaware of the vertical search resources that are out there. Indeed, Google has long put links to its vertical search services above the search box on its home page. First, they were in the form of “tabs,” then later as regular links that currently promote that you can vertically search for images, or video, or news, or maps, or in many more specialized areas.
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