I was doing some keyword research and was wondering how the new universal search results were playing out. I had blogged about how it was changing the landscape on search results and thought I would do a followup to determine if any changes had occur since then and there has.

It wasn’t a surprise to me but it looks as if they (Google) has started to scale back on the supplemental results (News, Video and Local) they are providing in searches. Local and Video seemed to be holding steady with Youtube being placed 5th in video searches and local not changing at all. News on the other hand looks be on the way out or at the least significantly scaled back.

There is no doubt that there are several reasons for this but the one I think of first is the natural results becoming polluted with non popular results as shown above. Look at the big fat ZERO page rank associated with the Youtube listing. That result knocked someone that did have a decent page regarding that term off the front page. And for what? Because someone is too lazy to add video to the term or click on the video search link on the results page?

Google has a dedicated section for news and it is very simple to navigate to. It isn’t that hard to click one more time for specialized results for the search term. The Blog, News, Video and Local searches are all excellent sources of information and trying to cram them on the first page of natural searches is not a good idea in my opinion.

I am a HUGE fan of automation and reducing the number of clicks it takes to get the content you are seeking. However you need to look at it from another perspective. If quality sources are being bumped off the front page of results due to news or video results and the surfer that is conducting the search could care less about video or news results, well you just made it harder for him/her to find what they were looking for. You following me?

Here are two searches that had contained news results embedded in the regular search results and now neither of them have news results embedded in them.

Dallas Cowboys 
Tennessee Titans