Now that many of us have been looking at the new Universal search results provided by Google for a little while now, I was wondering if anyone has started to notice any defining trends or realities when optimizing for it. How does Google pick and choose when to show news, pictures, or video results? If there are nothing but organic website results and PPC ads, does that mean that there is no competition for this term on News, Pix, Video, or that nothing has been entered into Base for product search etc...? It might seem like quite a large topic, but since Google has pretty forcefully hinted that the future would be different (except that the old meta tag stuffers can once again have fun in Base), that we might at least start a discussion on what this brave new world would look like, and what we can do to step in line, so to say, and not get left behind.
This concept of Universal Search by Google is not new. Google introduced universal search back in May, 2007.
"Now that many of us have been looking at the new Universal search results provided by Google for a little while now,", this I know.