The Search Engine Strategies session on Universal and Blended Search was the highlight of the day at SES on Monday. A great panel made up of a cross section of industry luminaries made for stimulating and varied discussion of one of the biggest things to launch in search for years. Panelist Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR suggested that Universal search is a huge development and rivals the Google Florida update.
Jarboe showed some screenshots including recent phrases in the news done NOT at Google News, but at Google standard search. A half dozen examples brought up in various combinations – news story results (with photo thumbnail), videos, photos, blog results, maps, images and onebox results. The position of each of those in the rankings varied, but news and maps were usually nearer the top or at the top, with video results hovering around the middle of the page and blog results, photos (from image search) at the bottom of the page.
While we’ve heard the term “Google Universal Search” used quite often, this is the first time I’ve heard it shortened to “G.U.S.” Sherwood Stanieri of Catalyst Online followed Jarboe and discussed how universal and blended search affects video in the rankings. In researching how positions in the top 10 results change but show inconsistencies in how their rank was determined by relating those results to pagerank, number of views of those videos and numbers of comments to those videos on social sites and finally, the popularity of the topic searched on.
In Universal search it appears that Google “Hot Topics” (formerly Zeitgeist) is a part of the algo since those topics spiking in popularity will bring up video results more often if they are on that list (and likely photos, news and relevant blog posts).
Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea was up next and pulled his expected studious dissecting of search patents into the discussion. While I’d love to say I did follow a few of his examples and agree with his conclusions and assertions – I can’t outline them effectively here as they seemed to bounce around a bit, pulling bits and pieces out of published patent here and there and back to his own findings, then to search results.
Google engineer David Bailey leads the Universal Search effort and summed up his thoughts on what Universal Search means to SEO by saying “Business as Usual”. OK David, I happen to agree, but couldn’t you expand a bit? Tim Mayer of Yahoo briefly how Yahoo’s Blended search intent was to improve user experience, but to me it appeared that Yahoo intends to do all they can to keep searchers on the Yahoo site, with pop-up windows, shortcuts to the giants of ebiz and exclude all but their own pages from click-throughs. Eric Collier of Ask talked about their new 3D search, and how fewer users moved to page two of results, suggesting better relevancy of page one results.
I’ll reiterate what David Bailey had to say “Business as Usual” when it comes to SEO – Google improves results and sends more searchers to relevant sites, Yahoo keeps users on their site and Ask works pretty well, but can’t get a handle on a substantial market.
Mike Valentine is an SEO Specialist offering occassional commentary on Search Engine Developments through his Reality SEO Blog and developed WebSite101 Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial in 1999 to help educate the little guy to the intricacies of online business.
Search Engine Marketing Conference & Expo 2007, Hong Kong
The Advanced Event for Search Engine Marketing & Optimization Comes to Hongkong, with update knowledge and case study targeting both Chinese and English market.
Search Expo ( Search Engine Marketing Conference & Expo ) is the China based conference series that keeps asian marketers ( as well as international marketers ) informed about search engine marketing and optimization issues in Chinese and English market, especially the Simplied Chinese market. These events teach you the ins-and-outs of chinese search engine marketing skill, knowledge and techs from top experts in the field, along with information from the chinese search engines themselves. These events also teach you global ( English ) search marketing skills and strategies to attract businss leads or brand awareness
Search Expo is initiated by Timev Media from China. Timev Media has the most efficient network with china leading SEO/SEM companies and their pros. Timev Media opitmizes all the resources and the conference content, bring the bilingual SearchExpo to serve the asian marketer, advertisers and search engines.
It is time to mark you calendar because you need to be in Hong Kong at SearchExpo, Nov 8th-9th, 2007
Event Overview
1.This Hong Kong event will be a bilingual one, in both Chinese and English
2.Organized by search authorities Inway Ni, SES Xiamen 2007 Programming Director, VP of Timev
3.Delivers real-time actionable information you need to grow your business through Search Engine Marketing.
4.Teaches the ins-and-outs of search engine marketing from top search experts and the search engines themselves.
5.Provides a unique setting to network with fellow marketers and search engine industry professionals and discuss the trends in search engine marketing.
6.Grants access to the world’s most comprehensive gathering of search engine marketing & optimization-related solutions providers and potential partners & affiliates.
7.Search Engine Marketing Conference 2007 features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion.
Who you will meet
1.Global SEM/SEO gurus
2.Chinese SEM/SEO experts Stone Chen, Eric Yao and 4-6 well-selected experts
3.Search Engines from Hong Kong and mainland China.
4.Advertisers’ marketing directors .
5.B2B and Yellow Pages and their marketers
What You Will Learn
1.Who are the major search engines beyond baidu, google, yahoo?
2.How to market and optimize with characterbased content?
3.How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results.
4.How to understand the Chinese internet users’ behavior?
5.How to find and work with local partners?
6.How to monetize on the massive grass-root web sources?
7.How search engines list Web sites for free and through paid placements?
8.How to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors ?
9.How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results?
10.How to calculate the ROI of your search marketing efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buy—and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t?
11.How to build links that generate traffic to your Web site, and how to avoid the penalties of “spamming” the search engines?
12.What’s coming next in the constantly evolving world of Web search, and how you can profit from those changes?
13.How to evaluate each B2B and online yellow pages?
Contact US：
http://event.timev.com/en/SEM/hk07/
tel:86-592-5769777 86-592-5769935
email: reg@timev.com sponsor@timev.com media@timev.com