Universal Search Loves Video, Images

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!

Google Wins In Universal Search

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 results
• Google 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 results
• Google’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.

How Is Universal Search Defined?

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).

Related Stories

• Google 2.0: Google Universal Search
• Google Universal Search Expands
• Study: Google “Favors” Itself Only 19% Of The Time
• Googleopoly: The Definitive Guide To Antitrust Investigations Against Google

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, confirmed the change via an update to the official Google blog post that originally announced the new feature:

Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users’ choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special “doodle” that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of images as the background for our homepage. We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.

That followed Mayer’s earlier confirmation via her Twitter account today, where she had said:

Actually as of now :) @Jon_E Google search background back to normal tomorrow, says @marissamayer.

Google did explain through the post that for today, it was showing a photo background on its normally clean, white home page. However relatively few Google users actually read its blog, so wouldn’t know what was going on.

In addition, many people appear not to have liked it, ironically turning to Google desperately seeking a way to turn it off. Google Trends, which shows popular queries, showed a spike for “remove google background” searches:

Russell Crowe hasn’t died, by the way, if you notice that in the trends above. That’s a rumor almost certainly sparked by the same site that made people think that Jeff Goldblum died last year (he didn’t).

Today, I’ve seen a number of tweets where people were trying to figure out how to turn off the feature. One option was to use the Editor’s Choice “white” pick, which actually didn’t restore “Classic” Google. In addition, that option seemed only available to people with Google accounts. To use it, you had to sign in. Plenty of Google users don’t have Google Accounts.

The entire thing reminded me and some others of a story featured on the Huffington Post (apparently via Topless Robot) where an older woman is confused about how to turn off the Google Pac-Man game that ran for two days last month. She couldn’t figure out how to turn it off and called tech support for help.

The recording of her conversation has just been removed from YouTube, flagged as private. But listening to it, it did make me realize that just saying something is going to go away after a certain date still isn’t that helpful. That Pacman game just started with no off switch. So, too, did the background.

The confusion only adds to the failure today’s experiment probably has turned into. Over at Techmeme, a site that collects headlines from technology blogs and related mainstream media sources, there are plenty of headlines talking about Google having “Bing-envy” or becoming Bing for the day:

Bing, of course, made a big splash when it launched a year ago by having a home page with a different picture that appeared each day. It actually had that feature before under its Live Search name, but it got renewed attention as part of the launch.

My previous article, Google Home Page: Now Featuring Your Pictures, provides more background about what Bing has done, how they borrowed from Ask.com plus how Google’s new “add your own picture” feature was launched last week. Google denied then that it was trying to copy Bing:

“The real motivation for this had to do with iGoogle,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience. “Some users really prefer the classic look but want a small amount of personalization, so this is a happy medium in between.” She added, “We think it has the same type of appeal that wallpaper does on your desktop or your phone.”

Fair enough, letting people add their own pictures as a custom background is not a direct copy of Bing. It’s actually a feature that Bing itself should offer but doesn’t.

However, today’s move to automatically change the Google background using photos that Google selected was definitely a direct copy, and from a company that claims it doesn’t copy others. Yes, it was only meant to last a day. Yes, it was meant to promote the “add your own picture” feature. But I also felt it was designed to test how Google users might react if Google did a picture-per-day like Bing on its home page.

Answer? A lot apparently are fine with plain old “boring” Google.

The new user interface — UI for the tech crowd — places search options into a column on the left-hand side of the search results page. Search results themselves appear in the middle, in a wider column. Ads appear in the right column, though some ads continue to appear in the middle column above editorial picks:

To me, the new look is colorful yet clean and not distracting. It should make it easier for searchers to drill-down further into their queries. Having personally tested it in the past, when I’ve been included in Google’s trial tests like many others picked randomly, I’m glad to see it finally go mainstream. It rolls out today worldwide in 26 languages. Google tells me that by the end of the day, everyone should see the new look.

Many of the options in the new left-hand search options column aren’t new. Google made many of these features available a year ago and then expanded them last October (see Up Close With Google Search Options). However, in order to find the options, you had to “open up” the search options column that by default was left off. Today’s change opens up the column permanently, which should cause many more people to make use of these.

The move to a permanently three-column design sees Google following in the footsteps of Ask.com, which pioneered the look back in 2007. Bing and Yahoo followed the three pane trend in 2009, and now it has effectively been given the stamp of approval by search giant Google itself.

Below, a closer look at the new design and options, followed by some history and background. Search Options Column

The new search options column (or left panel, as Google calls it internally) is devoted to ways for people to refine their searches:

Within the column are three sections, which I’ll cover in turn.

The top portion lists “content types,” that is, the types of content that a search can be narrowed to. For example, in the search below for tidal waves, you can see that the results contain things like web pages, images and video matches, all blended together in the same column as part of Google’s Universal Search system:

That the default “Everything” search — where Google is mixing together everything it believes is relevant to your query, regardless of the exact content. Filtering By Content Type

What if you’d like only images of tidal waves? That’s where the colorful content type choices come in. Select “Images” and that content type gets highlighted in blue, to indicate that the results to the right have now been filtered to show only image matches (along with, oddly, two ads from Google rivals Yahoo and Ask both hoping to catch some Google searchers):

Similarly, select the Videos option, and now only matching videos are shown:

Exactly which content type options appear depend on the actual query. Google says it automatically tries to highlight the most relevant filtering that people may want, based on the content that it finds for a search.

For example, the tidal wave search above features options to narrow by Images and Videos. But a search for iPhone provides provides different narrowing options:

Now the choices are to narrow by Shopping, News and Blog content. The assumption is that people searching for iPhone information may be most interested in these categories of results, while those searching for tidal waves may be more interested in images or videos. As before, selecting one of these other options narrows to the particular content type, such as how choosing News brings back only news content about the iPhone:

Not happy with the content choices that Google features by default? That’s where the “More” option at the end of the list comes in. Select that, and you can see all available options:

Sources Of Content

Where’s all this content coming from? Google has many specialty search engines that it taps into. Below are the ones that the new menu gives access to:

Blogs: Google Blogs, blog and RSS/feed content from across the web. See our Google: Blog Search category for more background.

Books: Google Books, book results from Google’s library scanning project and books contributed by authors and publishers. See our Google: Book Search category for more.

Images: Google Images, matching images from around the web. See our Google: Images category for more.

News: Google News, news and blog content from across the web. See our Google: News category for more.

Maps: Google Maps, maps and local listings from across the web and third-party sources. See our Google: Maps & Local category for more.

Shopping: Google Product Search, product and shopping listings from across the web. See our Google: Product Search category for more.

Videos: Google Video, video from across the web — including Google-owned YouTube but not limited to that. See our Google: YouTube & Video category for more.

Updates: Google Real Time Search, which shows the latest information found by Google from sources such as news, blogs and especially social sharing sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Unlike the other services above, Google Real Time Search does not have a standalone site that you can use. See our Google: Real Time Search category for more information.

• Code Search
• Directory
• Finance
• Groups
• Patent Search
• Scholar

Why don’t these show up as content types? This is because Google only shows content types for the search engines it automatically checks for any query.

In other words, do a search, and Google’s Universal Search system automatically checks places like Google Images and Google Books for matches. However, it doesn’t automatically query places like Google Finance or Google Scholar. So, those don’t appear as narrowing options.

To further confuse matters, Google also has a few specialized search tools that DO automatically get checked for any query, such as Google Music, Google Health, movie times and more. However, you can’t narrow results to these. These results only show within special “OneBox” units.

Search Tools

If you’ve made it through digesting the new content types in the search options column, there’s more fun in store midway down, in the search tools section. This allows you to narrow results within a content type by time or by other relevant filters.

As with content types, what appears by default will depend on the type of query issued. For example, for volcanic ash:

“Latest” is shown as a time filtering option, which makes sense given that many people may seek the latest results on this breaking news topic.

In contrast, consider these filtering choices for iPad:

“Latest” returns as a time filter, along with “Past 3 Days.” But more interesting are the “Fewer shopping sites” and “More shopping sites” options. Again, these make sense. For this query, Google can safely assume many people might be interested in shopping info about the iPad. However, a good chunk of people might also want more informational pages about the iPad — hence a handy ability to “deshoppify” the results.

As with content types, if you’re not happy with the default search tools picks that Google makes, you can use the “More search tools” option to see a full range. Here’s what you get doing that from an “Everything” search:

Time Filtering

The first set of tools involve filtering by time — narrowing to “Latest” results, past 24 hours, past week, month, year or even a custom date range, complete with pop-up calendar picker:

Occasionally, I’ve also seen other options appear, such as “Past 2 months” or “Past 3 days,” as noted above.

While time filtering sounds great, my experience over the years has been that search engines, including Google, often get the dates wrong on pages for a variety of reasons. For a deeper drill-down on these issues, see these past articles:

• Up Close With Google Search Options
• Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates

If you select a date option, by default results will be sorted by relevance within that date period. For instance:

Above, I did a search for the word the, narrowed to the past 24 hours. I like this search because it points out one issue with date filtering. Notice the White House home page is third on the list, with a time of 11 hours ago. That’s not the time the page was first authored — the White House has been online much longer than that! It might be the time when Google last noticed a change was made to the page. It could also simply be the last time Google visited the page. Such are the issues when filtering by date.

Mainly, however, notice that the pages are not listed in chronological order. Some “fresher” pages appear below older ones. That’s because the default sort is by relevancy. However, select the “Sorted by date” option, and this changes:

Nearby Filtering Another option is the ability to filter results to those near your location — at least the location Google assumes you’re at, which it determines by the internet address (IP address) reported by your internet service provider, company, school or organization.

Nearby filtering sounds great. For example, a seach for topics such as bicycle rentals or zoos or moving companies when toggled to “nearby” should bring back results relevant to your particular location.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find using the option made much difference, much as was the case when we first reported on it being offered in Feburary (see Google Adds “Nearby” Local Search To Options Panel). In part, I suspect this is because Google already does localizing of results by default, through its personalized results. For instance, since Google already knows I’m in San Francisco (at the time I wrote this), many of my results I tested already had San Francisco-related material ranking highly. In effect, I was already being shown “nearby” results even without clicking on that.

The nearby options are shown below. When selected, you can further refine “nearby” to mean at your city, region or state level — as well as entering a custom location, if Google’s not detecting your area correctly:

View Options

Further down, there are three alternative “views” you can apply to your results other than the default “standard” view:

Related Searches puts a list of queries related to your original search at the top of the search results:

Timeline tries to build a timeline of interesting facts related to your query, by exacting information about the subject that’s associated with particular dates on web pages. You get a chart and facts listed in chronological order:

Wonder Wheel is a visual refinement tool, which allows you click your way through related topics as they emanate out like spokes on a wheel. Each click to a new topic causes the results shown alongside the current “wheel” to change:

See also The Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Refinement Features Get Live Test for more about using the tool.

More Filtering Options

After the view options are additional ways to filter your results, some of which really belong either as additional view options or content type options, in my opinion, as I’ve written before. The options:

Sites With Images gives you what’s promised — web sites that also have images. Since most web sites have images, it’s hard to imagine this being that useful. But if you really want to read something and want pictures to go with it, maybe it’s worth a try. Here’s an example of what you get:

Fewer Shopping Sites / More Shopping Sites feels a lot like the Nearby option — it makes slight changes to the results that can be hard to notice. The main thing is that if you don’t like getting a Google Shopping one box unit like this in your results:

Then using the Fewer option makes it disappear: Using the More Shopping option also makes it appear. But if you’re really after shopping results, it makes more sense to use the Shopping content type option.

Page Previews will insert little thumbnail images of pages listed in the results:

Translated Search is kind of neat. It shows results that are not in your native language (as detected by your browser) and translates them into your language.

Something Different

Finally, the last portion of the search options column is called “Something Different.” It’s meant to suggest other queries that are related to your original one. For example, for Steve Jobs, people like Bill Gates or Michael Dell are suggested:

For a generic term like salads, you get items like pizza or salad bar suggested:

Somewhat related to this is a new feature that came out last week, “Pages Similar To” — not to mention a long-standing feature, “Searches related to.” Both are shown below, in how they appear at the bottom of the search results for best buy:

You can see how Google suggest related pages — which really are related companies like CircuitCity or Walmart. That can be handy for searchers, though it probably drives some brand holders crazy that Google’s recommended their competition (similar to how it does this on Places pages in Google Maps). Below this come suggested searches.

Bottom Redesign

As long as we’re at the bottom of the search results, it’s also worth noting they’ve gotten a facelift as part of the new look and have been cleaned up. The old:

and the new:

Specific Search Tools For Specific Content Types

When I covered search tools above, I looked at what appeared in response to an “Everything” search. However, when you drill into particular areas, the Search Tools may change — sometimes dramatically so.

For example, in a search for iPhone narrowed to Images, you get new options designed to let you narrow by size, type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing) or by color:

Narrowing to video brings up video-related options such as length of clip, time it was published, video quality, use of closed captioning and source of clip:

Filtering to books allows options to find books that are “full view” (you can read them in their entirety), to filter to magazines, to see results in a grid display and even filtering time …. by century!

Selecting discussion allows for special filtering such as discussions on forums versus Q&A sites as well as “short” versus “medium” and “long” discussions:

For blogs, there are short time options, such as 10 minutes or the past hour:

For news, there are options to see “all news” versus news images or news from blogs:

If I click to filter to news content from blogs, I also get specialized time filtering options, such as over the past hour or for particular years, 2007, 2008 and so on:

Also notice how the colorful content type bars have suddenly disappeared. That second drill-down kicked me over into Google News itself, rather than the main Google.com site — and the new UI didn’t carry through there.

Things like that also happen if you use either the Shopping or Maps areas. Drilling into these bring up specific options but not keeping the look-and-feel of the new left column. Shopping looks like this:

You can see that once you go into Shopping, all the other content type choices disappear. You can’t “tab” back to them.

The same is true for Maps. In addition, three column design goes away, falling back to two columns — one on the left for listings and textual infomation, while the right column is for the map itself:

Google’s aware of the issues with Shopping and Maps.

“We’re just not there yet, but they’re coming soon,” said Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google.

A New Logo

In other changes, Google’s logo has had a facelift. Gone are the heavy drop shadows. The colors are said to be “punched up,” and did you know the Google L was a bit crooked? It’s had a nose job now. The old and new:

Also gone is the trademark notation, TM. Google said it didn’t show well on smaller sizes of its logo and that it was determined to be no longer necessary to show.

Playing Copycat?

Back in June 2007, Ask.com made a splash with its new three column look called “Ask 3D.” The left column was used to present search refinement options, similar to how Google is showing them generally now. The middle column had results. Unlike Google, the third column didn’t have ads but rather was used for vertical search results.

Two years later, in June 2009, Microsoft relaunched its search engine as Bing. It also used a three column design, with the left column for search refinement options.

Then in August 2009, Yahoo did the same, a three column design, with left column used for refinement (see )

Now Google has made the jump, raising the inevitable question — isn’t it just copying the others?

“We have been working on a left-hand nav since 2006 and in mocks far before that,” Wright said.

Indeed, left-hand navigation was spotted in the wild back in December 2005, though it was very rudimentary. And arguably, Google had a solid three column look when the search option column was unveiled as a user choice last year, just before the Bing launch.

I doubt that will prevent Bing from poking fun that Google’s just copying them — much less people from Ask back who were there back when Ask 3D launched under then CEO Jim Lanzone from feeling like everyone is copying them. Ironically, Ask dropped the three column look about a year later after a management change.

Why Now?

Fun about who is playing copycat aside, why has it taken so long to finally get a three column design, a format that Google’s vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer described last November as a “universal truth,” to finally become a permanent addition to Google? (See Google Tackles Its “UI Jazz” Problem, Tests Streamlining Search Options Feature for her comments and some of the design philosophy behind today’s changes)

“The real issue for us has really been when our technology would be powerful enough and relevant enough that it [search options] deserves to be on the results pages,” Wright said.

For related news, see here and here on Techmeme.

That’s a key issue. Google doesn’t want to have the same options showing up all the time, regardless of what someone searches on. It aims to have only the most relevant options appear, so they stand out and are useful.

We’ll see how well Google hits that goal. Some options offered don’t always seem useful; some don’t perform as dramatically as I might have expected, with very limited testing that I’ve done so far. But often they do work very well, and I’m certainly glad to have them within handy reach, rather than having to search, then push a button to get access to them.

And do people really use them?

“Absolutely. We don’t want to give out any numbers here, but we’re definitely seeing more usage of the tools and the properties,” Wright said.

Postscript (May 7): For the most part, I’ve not seen huge outcry against Google’s new look. Given the number of people who use Google daily, it pretty much seems to have been accepted without much protest. But not everyone is happy. Here’s a long thread on Google’s support forum where some people don’t like it and want an option to have “old” Google. That seems like a good option for Google to offer. However, my experience is that Google won’t do it. When they roll out changes, they pretty much force everyone to see them. I am checking on this, however.

Now, we know Google was testing hotel prices in Google Maps via AdWords but these are prices directly in the organic results.

How is this possible? If you look closely, you will see that the search results come from a shopping search filter that was set to on. Tnooz blog said that Google automatically set the user to the shopping search results, without the user requesting for this to be specifically on. They said, “the screen grabs were from Google Shopping – a service which includes prices but is obtained by filtering results AFTER an initial search is been carried out.” Google told the blog that Google runs tests and this may be one of those tests.

If this is indeed a test, then maybe Google starting to experiment beyond showing elements of vertical searches within the web results, like they do in the Universal Search results. Now, they are potentially bypassing that front page and taking users directly to a filtered search experience by only showing shopping results, in this case. This is a major change to how Google handles search queries and results.

I have emailed Google for more clarification on this example and hope to update this post when I learn more.

Here is a picture of weather results, a form on Universal Search, directly in the Google Search box:

I personally do not see it yet, but I am sure it will show up soon.

The Quick Scroll Chrome extension will help you locate the keywords on the page you clicked on from the Google search results page. Here is a picture of how that looks:

I know a bit of Hebrew, so I tried to test out the search results on Google Israel on my iPhone. Unfortunately, I did not see the same mobile friendly results, with universal search, on my iPhone. Maybe it was related to me searching on my iPhone or searching in the states, I don’t know.

What it should look like is:

What I see on my iPhone:

Heck, it doesn’t even look iPhone friendly. To give Google some credit, the iPhone is not fully supported yet in Israel, so maybe this is not functional on the iPhone yet. Maybe it is only working on supported mobile devices?

This is precisely what 360i has now tried to do. The company evaluated 40 retail-oriented keywords/searches to compare results before and after, and the potential SEO implications of Caffeine:

[A] sample set of 40 retail keywords. We looked at ten major retail brand names (keywords), ten retail head terms (single keywords), ten retail torso terms (two-word phrases) and ten retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases) and compared the search results on the first three pages of both engines (standard Google and “Caffeinated” Google).

With the caveat that “everything could change” before Caffeine formally rolls out 360i offered six observations or “things to expect” if/when it does. Here they are:

1. Domains and rankings will fluctuate.
2. The index size, or “competition,” of single keyword search relevance will increase.
3. You’ll see a boost in relevance for long-tail searches.
4. You’ll get results (SERPs) in half the time, on average.
5. Blended results will increase.
6. There will be a social jolt.

To read the larger discussion of each of these takeaways go to the 360i blog post.

Just as Microsoft was and is synonymous with the PC, Google has come to be synonymous with the internet in popular culture. But with the rise of mobility and “the cloud” the question arises: ten years from now will Google still be on top?

There has also been a paradox around search. It can’t and won’t remain the same in this dynamic environment, and although there have been some UI changes (as well as infrastructure changes to support those), it has been hard to imagine what the future would look like exactly. Sergey Brin, writing this years’ Founder’s Letter, addressed the state of Google but also looked into the future of search:

I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that “understands” more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google’s systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web — for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much “smarter” in the coming decade.

So too will the interfaces by which users look for and receive information. While many things have changed, the basic structure of Google search results today is fairly similar to how it was ten years ago. This is partly because of the benefits of simplicity; in fact, the Google homepage has become increasingly simple over the years: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html. But we are starting to see more significant changes in search interfaces. Today you can search from your cell phone by just speaking into it and Google Reader can suggest interesting blogs without any query at all. It is my expectation that in the next decade our searches and results will look very different than they do today.

One of the most striking changes that has happened in the past few years is that search results are no longer just web pages. They include images, videos, books, maps, and more. From the outset, we realized that to have comprehensive search we would have to venture beyond web pages. In 2001, we launched Google Image Search and via Google Groups we made available and searchable the most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings ever assembled (800 million messages dating back to 1981).

Larry Dignan thinks the reference in this letter to “a search engine that ‘understands’” is an indirect reference to Wolfram/Alpha. (it could equally be about claims made by Kosmix, Hakia, Powerset [Microsoft] and a couple of others.) In terms of the future of search, Twitter and other “Help Engines” could also represent a compelling new direction the market and industry could go.

Back to Google: today the company held a press briefing before Google’s annual shareholder meeting. It featured Dave Drummond, SVP, corporate development; Susan Wojcicki, VP product management; Kent Walker, general counsel; and Marissa Mayer, VP search products. They fielded an array of queries on everything from Eric Schmidt’s continued membership on the Apple board (he hasn’t considered resigning) to YouTube (“eventually [it will] be a successful and profitable business”). Here’s a factual rundown from both AllThingsD and TechCrunch (I wasn’t present).

There were no revelations apparently, though Eric Schmidt again pointed to the netbook arena as one that would see some Google-friendly developments in the near future.

Google says they’re guessing the searcher’s location, “in most cases” by using your IP address. As I pointed out last week, this isn’t always the most accurate solution. And, as Greg Sterling pointed out, Google will eventually replace IP-targeting with improved triangulation/GPS right in the web browser/device you’re using.

Meanwhile, Google Software Engineer Jim Muller replied to the questions we emailed last week when I wrote the original article on this. A few days have passed, but here’s what Jim had to say about the new expanded local search results.

Matt: Has this been rolled out for all Google users, or are only some people getting these results?

Jim: Yes, this is now available to all users worldwide.

How many terms have you targeted for this expansion of the 10-pack? (I don’t get the 10-pack when I search for “cars”, for example.) Are we talking dozens or hundreds of terms? More?

Many many more. We try to include all the world’s local information in the database that we search, so all that’s really required is a match to a place that’s near you. For example if you search for specific stores or specific street addresses near you, we will often show the map. The map can appear in all the usual configurations: in groups of 10, groups of 3, or alone.

But as you noted, we don’t always show the map. We try to show it whenever our algorithms determine that it will be most useful.

The 10-pack on these broad queries never seems to show up at the top of the results — not even “pizza.” Is that by design, or might it appear at the top for certain queries?

For these queries, the user’s intent is less explicitly local than for a query like [pizza baltimore], so our ranking algorithms tend to rank the map in the middle of the page. For the highest quality single results, our ranking algorithms often place them higher on the page, and in particular street address queries often appear on a map at the top, as we would with a strong user intent query.

This has potentially huge implications for searchers, local business owners, big businesses with a local presence, and search marketers, too. As I wrote on my own blog yesterday, Google is changing the game where local search is concerned. As Andrew Shotland asked, is every search local now? No, but we’re getting there. Google must be very confident in its ability to identify local intent, and its ability to minimize the ongoing map spam problem.

An explanation below of how it seems to work and thoughts on what it means, but first try it yourself: Do a Google search for pizza, and you should see something like this, only tailored to your area:

Even though I didn’t add a city name to my query, Google is recognizing that my search probably has local intent and shows me the “10-pack” of local results with a corresponding map. The results appear to be IP-based; the image above focuses on Kennewick, WA — it’s not my hometown, but is where my ISP is located, about 10 miles away.

How It Works

1.) Singularity / Plurality sometimes matters

Local results will show on a search for “attorneys”, but not “attorney.” Ditto for “real estate agents,” but not the singular version of that. In other cases, local results show for both — “plumber” and “plumbers,” for example.

2.) It’s not always the 10-pack

On some generic searches, you may get the older “three-pack” that just shows three matching businesses. In my area, searches for “bowling” and “ford dealer” only show three matching local results and a map. Makes sense, because I live in a smaller area and we don’t have 10 Ford dealers here.

3.) It’s not just commercial terms

The search marketer in me focuses on business-related queries, but this extends to non-commercial terms, too. A search for “parks” brings up a mix of listings — some community parks, local government listings, mobile home parks, and even a funeral home.

4.) Google’s local targeting is debatable

A search for “restaurants” or “italian restaurants” probably has local intent, and both of those generic terms show the local 10-pack for my area. But I also get local results on a similar, but not necessarily local search for “italian food.” I get local results on generic words like “liquor” and “burgers,” both of which might — or might not — mean I’m looking for something local. It’ll be interesting to watch if/how Google tweaks its algorithm to perfect its local targeting on generic terms.

5.) The local results are never the best match for a generic term

In all the searches I’ve done — as well as all the searches done by a half-dozen friends in the local SEO/SEM field — these local results never appear at the top of the results for a generic term. At best, they’re showing up in the fourth spot — and sometimes further down the page.

6.) Local results show internationally

Fellow search marketers have reported seeing the local results on non-local keywords in London, Canada, and all around the world. After I wrote about this on my own blog, Pieter van Schalkwyk from FlowCentric Australia said he also sees local Sydney results on a Google search for “attorneys.”

What it means

1.) This is great news for small/local businesses

With this change, small/local businesses will now be getting exposure on at least hundreds, and probably thousands of prime keywords. As search marketers, we often tell our small business clients that they don’t want to rank for terms like “lawyer” or “doctor” because they’re too generic, and the competition for those prime terms would be beyond their reach. But, with Google showing local results on this prime real estate, a big door of opportunity has just opened up. A doctor in Topeka can get visibility on the term “doctor,” but only when local folks type it in.

Likewise, this should be good news for local search marketers who understand the ins and outs of optimizing local business profiles and web sites and can get their clients listed in the 10-pack or 3-pack. It also further kills the value of ranking reports, because rankings are now even more tied to geography and even your choice of ISP (see below for more).

2.) Searcher behavior may change

We recently reported that search queries are getting longer, and these generic, 1- and 2-word queries are declining. Perhaps some of that is due to searchers not being happy with the results after using a generic term like “restaurants” or “real estate agents.” All of that might be out the window now. Google’s AdWords keyword tool says there were about 6 million searches for “restaurants” in February. How many of those searchers will be happy now that they’ll get local results for such a broad term? Enough to influence the overall searcher behavior? Possibly.

3.) Suddenly, your choice of ISP matters

With the results based on the searcher’s IP, it now matters who your ISP is — and more importantly, who your customers use as their ISP. Here are the results I get from home on a search for “lawyer.”

Meanwhile, my wife’s office about 10 miles away uses a different ISP. They’re also based in Kennewick, but here’s what she sees on the same search from her office.

Notice that the order is slightly different: results B & C are switched, as are I & J. What would happen if one of us was using an ISP based in Pasco or Richland? We’d probably see an entirely different set of results because the IP address would point to a different city. How different will results be if your ISP is in Minneapolis, but you’re living in St. Paul? One Chicago-based search marketer told me on Twitter that he was getting pizza results for North Carolina! (His IP is based off a corporate server.)

4.) Google Maps will be a big winner

The added exposure of Google Maps and its local business listings will surely increase traffic to Google Maps. As of last January, Google Maps only got one visit for every 45 visits to a Google property. That should start to increase dramatically in the coming months.

The losers are likely to be companies like MapQuest, whose traffic will probably decline as even more searchers are exposed to Google Maps. And city guides / Internet Yellow Pages sites (like Citysearch, Yelp, Superpages.com, and so forth) may also see a loss of traffic, because their pages often ranked highly for some of these generic terms.

We have an email in to Google with some questions and requests for more information. We’ll update this post or publish a new one if/when we hear back.