Blended search or as Google calls it Universal search was released with much fanfare in May 2007 and going to change the face of search results forever. Hearing Google Australia representatives talk about it and answer questions at events on it was a case of “its coming, and will be driven by users”.

Well where has it gone? Its July 2008 and Google.com.au (Search Australia) is a Universal Search desert. Google.com.au (Search the web) has some blended results but mainly news. Universal search appears not to be that Universal, in fact its battling to straddle the planet.

The stats:

Looking at around 700 searches on product related searches from category through to a product specific terms, we established the following:

  • Google.com.au – Australia only has less than 1% of its results including a blended result
  • Google.com.au – Search the web had around 9% of its results include a blended result however 90% of those were News results
  • Google.com – Around 18% of the results included blended results and these were far more venly spread, including books, scholar and blogs, none of which showed up locally.
  • Time relevance also plays a part. Newsworthy or recent events, such as for example the Iphone will show up more in results, and include a wide variety of image, video and blog results
  • Blogs in many cases were a favoured source, no doubt because they would be considered more recent and current
  • Standard optimisation did and did not always play a factor in the ranking and showing of the media, specifically images and video, however relevant keywords definitely are on the page where the media originates from and in most cases the site is “trusted”

What do we make of all this?

So, all the hype may be just that? I think not. Google tends to take a longer term view. Consider spam. A lot of effort was put into the US results and then rolled out. We saw the first high profile spam victims around September 2007. As with duplicate content, some communications, changes in the US and then an international focus.

I think we might be seeing avery different story with Universal search in Australia within 12 months. Lets just hope this blog-post is archived by then if I am wrong.