Searching through a universe of media

If you use Google, and the majority of the living, breathing population does, you may have noticed a change in the home page of the search engine. Along the top of the page, you'll find links for Web, Images, Video, News, Maps, Gmail and more.

Those links are part of what Google is calling its Universal Search. According to company's blog (this from a May 16th post): "Today...launching the new architecture and using it to blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results. With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results."

The beauty of this functionality is that Google makes your search more efficient, allowing you to bypass scrolling through search pages. (Although I've got admit, I found the "news" search rather limited on some of the searches I did. But the images link pulls up an amazing amount of stuff.)

What this means is an even greater functionality for users, and another example of how media is converging rapidly. It's no surprise that Google bought one of the most popular social networking site around, YouTube, home to countless amateur (and not so amateur) videos.

So what's it mean for you? It means that as this feature becomes more widely known and used, components on your website like video will become even more relevant. Imagine searching for schools, then clicking on the Video feature. You'll be offered a nicely served collection of images of the campus, the classrooms, etc. Or perhaps you'll be in search of a nice restaurant, and you'd like to see the interior.

It also ramps up the difficulty of being found through Internet search, but that's all part of the challenge in this rapidly evolving media world.

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This is another in a series of articles by Wisconsin search engine optimization specialist Greg Mischio.