Never: Images

Saturday, 30 July 2011

What Wins In Google Universal Search? Videos, Images & Google!

Searchmetrics has conducted a data analysis on what type of content appears most often in Google Universal Search results, as well as which sites are most visible in them. Video and image content wins, as does content hosted on Google’s own properties.

The most revealing data from the study, which the company provided to us and which may appear on its site soon, is that having a video is one of the best ways of showing up in the top results at Google.

The chart below shows up videos are by far the most found results in Google, with image content a distant second:

After video and image content are map results, news, books, shopping, images and then blogs.

The key point here, if you want to be seen in Google Universal Search, do video!

Searchmetrics also sent the top US based properties that come up under each universal search vertical:

As you can see from this chart, content hosted by Google clearly dominate, ranking tops in four of the five areas:

YouTube is the number one video site that shows up for video resultsGoogle Maps is the number one map site that shows up for map results.Google Product Search is the number one shopping site that shows up for shopping resultsGoogle’s Blogger is the number one image site that shows up for image results.

The top rankings will likely raise rumblings about Google favoring itself, an issue in the anti-trust reviews that it is currently undergoing.

This study defines the universal search results as the sections in the Google search results that read “News for…” or “Shopping results” or “Places for” or “Images for” and so on. The reason Google News is not dominating the news category, Searchmetrics says, is because the URLs in the “News for…” are URLs to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other news sites. Very rarely does Google have a link to a news article on their own domain name, at least at this point in time.

In terms of local search, Searchmetrics says that the data is drawn from searches related to large metro areas in the United States and would only be valid in those types of areas.

Correction: Our initial edition of this story had mistakenly reported the video line as the blog line (IE, said that blog content was most popular).

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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Wednesday, 20 July 2011

Google’s Got Logos, But Bing’s Home Page Images Attract Too

Fast Company has a fascinating article on Bing’s background images and how they are used to market the Bing service. While Google updates their logos to be fun and creative on special birthdays or occasions, Bing revamps their background with an image that stands out and leaves users asking for more.

If you haven’t noticed, Bing updates their home page background graphic daily (sometimes more often), with images and photography that are real eye catchers. They even add interactivity behind the background graphic by adding hotspots to the image, which lead to useful search queries.

Stephanie Horstmanshof, managing editor of Bing and the so-called “queen of the homepage” told Fast Company, “we thought it was a way to differentiate–to make things come alive and more approachable.”

How does Bing select which photo they want on their home page? Bing has a meeting every few weeks with a group of decision makers who review tons of user submitted photos and other photography and then pick the best to show on their home page. They don’t just look for pretty and interesting photos, they look for images that “makes you want to find out more about it,” said Horstmanshof.

After the photos are selected, a Bing writer adds the hotspots over the images and the background is scheduled in. The hotspots, along with the image, purpose is to drive more queries and show off Bing’s search capabilities.

The key here is to bring searchers back daily to use Bing more and more. I should note that Bing had the backgrounds and hotspots well before Bing was even a brand. Microsoft launched these background and hotspots under the “Live Search” brand, which failed to help Microsoft capture much market share. Bing, on the other hand, has been successful in increasing market share over the years.

Related Topics: Google: Logos | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Marketing

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