Google Universal Search

The online search universe is expanding, and everytime Google is making a change to its engine, the world notices and the competition follow.
The latest Google project “Google Universal Search” is taking the search experience to Web 3.0.
But what is “Google Universal”? The title in itself is self explanatory, Google wants to become the one stop shop to all search queries and bring the user everything associated with the keyword that is searched for. So to give you an example the next time you search “Aurelia Noel” in Google (just like you do every day ), not only you will get all the articles in this blog, testimonies, linkedin profile, but you may also find pictures, videos, articles and maybe one day books on me
The example may not be the best but I think you get it, Google will make it extremely simple for you to find everything on a particular query rather than having you search several times for queries related to the same subject. We are entering in a “new” (well not so new anymore), era in search marketing, combining text links and multimedia.
So far Google is taking a gradual approach in developping the project but this is definitly the way forward.

Now how will it affect competition?
This is difficult to say, as ever since Google annonced the GUS project, hybrid (copycat?) projects came from Yahoo and Ask! and Live Search revamped the whole interface to combat Goggliath.

But will Yahoo new search experienced (launched earlier this week) be good enough? My personal take on that is as long as Yahoo (and others) will copy instead of being innovative, it is unlikely to get people type something other than Google. 

How to find a good search agency?

I was at the Adtech last week and was really surprised to find so many search agencies, all of them claiming they were the best and had the best service offering on the market. I can understand why so many agencies want a part of the pie (Globally paid search investment shall reach the $10b mark this year) but this is getting complicated for companies to find the best providers.

So here is my £2 worth of wisdom and tips for identifying good companies to work for:

- Meet the team: a sales pitch is always good, but you need to meet the people who will be working on your account. Meet them on their premises and have them walk you through what they will be doing once your account is on board. This will also give you a unique opportunity to discuss with the “experts” and have a feel of what they can really deliver and how.
- Don’t be fooled by “Google advertising professional” logo: It only says the agency passed the Google test, they know how to run a campaign, but they may be pretty poor at managing it.  What I mean is they will make a great job sending traffic to your website, increase your ranking and make you look good on ”google.com” but it does not necessarily mean they will look into the strategic aspects of the campaign, integrate the campaign into broader marketing initiatives and increase your convertion and ROI.
- Ask for customers insights: The agency will usually be happy to give you case studies and customer references, if they are not you may want to think twice before signing the contract. If you are still not sure, ask your agency to meet one of their client so you could get a better idea of how the service and offering are translating into real “life”.
- Look at what they charge: If your agency is happy to work on a revenue share model or a tiered fee structure based on performance, it will indicate they have the same interest as you have: GROW revenue.
- Put them to the test: as part of RFP you can ask your agency to do a test campaign for you. You could then judge the results from one agency to another. You will also have agencies refusing to invest money without a firm commitment from you so you may want to have a couple of month contract to have them show what they can do.

It is important to keep an open mind while selecting search marketing agencies, also never be too shy to run through blogs and forum to gauge your search agency reputation.  

What’s new in Live Search?

A new Live Search platform is born, I think today is the official launch date. So what’s new in the Live Search world?

Well everything have been revamped and improved, Live Search now has some really cool functionnalities such as the “celebrity xRank”, which gauges whether online buzz around a certain celebrity is currently positive or negative. This is great for the gossip industry on a more professionnal note Live Search may now be able to compete with Google as the new platform offers:
- A more pertinent algorithm: Live Search interprets what users are looking for, even if they misspell a word, type in two separate words or else.
- A more powerful engine: “Microsoft is quadrupling the number of sites it searches for new information and overhauled the core technology that decides which results to display”, said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s search and advertising group.
- A complete search experience that combines not only images, videos or maps but also shopping guides and reviews if you are looking for a particular product.
- A focus on the 70M users that are already using Live Search. Microsoft hopes to get them to use Live Search for more of their daily online tasks. This way they can also get the momentum, build the reputation and work on customer loyalty in a world dominated by Google.

Live Search is not going to change the world of Search Engine in a day, especially when people tend to pick the industry leader. But I really think they are heading in the right direction and have a fair chance to make a difference in the years to come.