More in a series of articles about the “new Google”….

It has been widely acknowledged for quite some time that due to the vast size of Google, and the fact that it handles such a huge volume of information, that it has a problem returning relevant results. In 2005, Jupiter Research noted that engines needed to be split into verticals, such as blog, images, video etc, in order to return results that actually helped users make buying decisions. Outsell also noted that almost one third of searches resulted in failure by the search engines.

Google and the other engines obviously had to do something to clean up the results. The natural result of this is the new universal search. The big question for retailers is how do you get your site to confirm to the new criteria of relevancy?

Every one has probably heard about efforts by Google, the kings of search to incorporate all of its information from images, videos, blogs etc into one set of universal search results. The official explanation from Google VP of search products is “a seamless integrated experience to get users the best answers”. Sounds great, but what does it mean to retailers who are trying to position their sites for the holidays? Stay tuned to find out what you can do to stay ahead of the competition for this upcoming shopping season.