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.