The Glue Pages combine classic search results on the left hand column with more visual information related to your query in the middle and right section of the page. The results contain images, videos, articles, and more. For example, a search on diabetes returns standard search results on the left, in the middle we have WebMD results, followed by HowStuffWorks.com results, then results from Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, and even Google Blog Search.

Here is a picture of the full page of diabetes results on Yahoo Glue Pages, and here is a picture of a search on beatles on Yahoo Glue Pages.

Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience, Yahoo! India, said:

Searching on Glue Pages Beta will result in an experience that promises more than just web links. Users will receive more relevant, visually appealing search results from across the Web in one topical page. The new Glue Pages Beta feature for Yahoo! India Search supports our strategy to make Yahoo! the starting point on the Internet and demonstrates our commitment to provide a compelling online search experience.

I thought I’d gracefully retired from the Danny Sullivan Keynote Review business. Comparing Danny to Edward R. Murrow, assessing how the attendance stretched the room capacity… ahh, they were good times. Then I awoke to find myself in a large hall at the Santa Clara Conference Center. It wasn’t a dream! Turns out I was only a bit sleepy because that O’Hare blizzard delay caused me to land in San Jose at 3:00 a.m. on this day, February 26th, 2008. It was now 9:01 a.m., and a fresh Sullivan keynote was beginning at SMX West. There I was, sitting over to the right-hand side of the room (Danny’s left) near where Matt Cutts was hiding. Laptop open, battery charged. Danny speaks. As if this were liveblogging, which it isn’t, I now switch to the present tense.

The topic: Search 3.0, Search 4.0, and Beyond. To cover this — surely not, 4.0?? we’re still hearing complaints about Web 2.0! — Danny will have to cover 1.0 and 2.0. This is straightforward stuff for experienced search marketers, but brand new to many. Danny is talking about how Search 1.0 was primarily about on-page factors like keyword density and keyword matching. This was so unsophisticated, it more or less launched the practice of gaming the search engines. In those days, pre-1998, search engine optimization as Danny taught it through his Webmaster’s Guide to the Search Engines was relatively rare. In our hazy memories, we seem to remember, on one hand, ordinary marketers and webmasters making good use of Danny’s detailed, common-sense advice about how various search engines ranked content; and on the other, those who took that advice and ran with it in all sorts of evil ways. All will agree that Search 1.0 might have been a golden age for index spammers, but from the standpoint of the searcher, it sucked.

Moving onto Search 2.0, Danny is addressing the move by the search engines to address the link structure of the web, treating a link like a vote. While the most notable pioneer of this trend was Google with its PageRank method, Danny is also mentioning Direct Hit, which looked at click paths to assess the apparent popularity of different search results.

Already I am beginning to sense the difficulty of slotting particular search innovations into generations of x.0′s, given that Direct Hit’s methodology started to encroach into the types of behavioral analysis and quasi-personalization that would later be more fully developed under Search 3.0 (or 4.0, or 5.0, depending on who you ask). I won’t belabor the point but it seems to me too many .0′s here, and there’s a problem of implying a sort of temporal or generational shift where in some cases they may be just different aspects or types of search or different metaphors or philosophies that may not need to be relegated to the scrapheap just because they coexist with other (or newer) stuff.

Anyway, back to Search 2.0. Danny is pointing out that it didn’t take long for the optimizers to figure out how to game this supposedly bulletproof generation of search. You had the playful approach — Googlebombing — which would merely produce an embarrassing result on a non-popular query. But more fatally, you had the development of link farms and the link economy, developments which Google denied for years.

Danny is now turning to discussion of Search 3.0 – Universal and Blended Search. This is the phenomenon whereby search engines will increasingly mix and match other types of search results along with their standard Ten Blue Links search engine results page. For example, Google might place a YouTube video search result in position 5 on the page. Because the still image requires more space than a standard result, this takes up quite a bit of screen real estate, and pushes the remaining SERP’s that much farther down the page below the fold. A Google News result in position 10 takes up one more space that formerly would have been in the search marketer’s organic index playing field.

Spelling out the inadequacies of 1.0 and 2.0 actually serves as a pretty interesting piece of insight into why there is so much focus on 3.0 now. The official reason might be that users respond well to being provided with a variety of different types of information, a variety that can be refined over time by paying attention to click patterns. An unofficial reason, though, might be that Ten Blue Links often don’t withstand careful scrutiny on their own. The organic index is spam-ridden, user queries are often hard to disambiguate, and search algorithms are often failing to show definitive results. Finally, gen-2.0 search algorithms may over-reward “SERP staples” like Wikipedia, and fail to alert users to in-house content that the search engines might have spent much time developing.

Now Danny is illustrating the concept of Google Universal with a screenshot that shows a large number of local search results, totally dominating the area above the fold and pushing everything down the page. He’s saying “and look, they’re the top results, so you’re very likely to click on them.” I am now thinking to myself – “geez, they always do this! Grehan does it too!” This example clearly shows that local results are the second-highest results on the page, not first highest! Three attractively-positioned premium sponsored listings are taking up quite a bit of real estate above that, and are further highlighted with a goldenrod background. Moreover, about 4.5 sponsored listings are visible above the fold in the right margin, and they look pretty attractive too. I always have to remind these organic search gurus of this stuff!

Danny is also tipping his cap to blended search efforts at other search engines, such as Ask 3D and Morph. He gives a useful Yahoo example, showing how they blend in an event result from Upcoming, to give the search results page a fresh feel.

We’re barely into Search 3.0 and we’re now looking at making the so-called “social graph” and other elements of personalization a big part of search. This is Search 4.0, if you will. Danny is having mixed feelings about some of it.

Personalization can emanate from data the engines collect from portal pages such as iGoogle (funny, Danny doesn’t mention Yahoo’s personalized home pages dating back much farther); users bookmarking things specifically using the search engines’ bookmarking features or delicious (you’d also want to wonder about browser integration, web-based bookmarking 1.0, and also about the so-called P2P Search era, and why those failed to take hold whereas now the SE’s are seen as clever to integrate them?); search histories showing you what you’ve clicked on in the past; and web history or clickstreams. Danny says that Eurekster and Yahoo 360 haven’t succeeded yet. So, what are we to make of Search 4.0?

Danny is hitting a slightly skeptical note when it comes to talk of Facebook and the social graph. I think it is useful to play devil’s advocate here, and it doesn’t conflict with a recognition that the information could help advertisers and users. Danny’s light critique of this realm is the question of how seriously you can take a community where people have 5,000 “friends.” But those gathering data don’t need to take it all seriously — they could measure activity. The biggest problem with what Danny is calling “monitoring clicks in a trusted environment,” of course, is privacy. Bang on. If the social graph is tantamount to spyware, then for every significant action or advance, there is likely to be a reaction or retreat.

For the benefit of new attendees, Danny is fleshing out his talk to cover other key ideas that everyone should know about, but I’m using the time wisely to write the wrap-up paragraphs to this column.

I very much hope Danny reprises this exact same talk next year, but hopefully sooner. Many of those who come to the table with a little search knowledge that is now six years out of date can be dangerous and hazardous to work with. Except for a couple of nanoseconds as he discussed Search 1.0, Danny proffered nary a mention of meta tags, page titles, heading tags, or keyword density. Some of those basics are important, but they don’t constitute anything other than a starting point towards good rankings. Nor did he bore us with nonsense about reciprocal link pages or other warmed-over gimmicks.

Rest assured, the scam cold callers will keep the very least relevant search optimization techniques on the agenda for those impressionable enough to pick up the phone and listen. It’s a marketer’s job to stay current, though.

Search engines are getting smarter every year. Search marketers need to keep pace, and Sullivan’s keynote is a great way to introduce the beginner-to-intermediate audience to the cutting-edge stuff, from an authoritative source. I won’t be surprised if, next time around, I see a few attendees being literally dragged in by the ears. Listen to what Danny’s saying! You can’t go wrong.

Andrew Goodman is the founder and principal of Page Zero Media and author of Winning Results with Google AdWords. The Paid Search column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.

The Big Picture: Comparative Ranking & Blending

With Universal Search, Google promised that two major things would happen:

• Comparative Ranking
• Blending

Before Universal Search, Google gave a list of 10 web search results — the best 10 selected by measuring those pages against all the web pages in the Google index of billions. Separately, Google decided if other information should be added to the search results page using different mechanisms.

For example, if you got web search results with news headlines above them, the headlines did NOT appear because Google tried to determine if the news results were more relevant than the web search results. It gave you web results, and a different process independently decided if news results should be added.

Universal search changed this. In it, Google said that web search results were measured directly against other types of search results, such as images or news. If those results were deemed more relevant than web search, then they’d be added to the page. That’s the comparative ranking part.

Google also typically would take away a web search listing if comparative ranking decided that a vertical search listing should go on the page. That’s the blending part. For example, news results might instead be “blended” within the regular 10 listings area, perhaps at position four, or six, or wherever, rather than always being put at the top.

Comparative Ranking Sources Expand & Blending No Longer Subtracts

When Universal Search launched, comparative ranking ran against these vertical or specialized search engines as well as web search:

1. Web Search
2. Book Search
3. Images
4. Local/Maps
5. News
6. Video

Since around December, Google says two more vertical search engines have been added to the list:

1. Blog Search
2. Product Search

As for blending, also toward the end of last year, this changed. No longer was it a case of a one-to-one replacement, where a web search listing had to go away to make room for a vertical search listings. That can still happen, but it’s also the case that blending can mean adding vertical results to the web search results, without taking some of the web search listings away.

Revisiting Blending: Local Search

It’s easiest to explain some of the blending changes with real examples, so let’s take a look. I’ll start with a local search, for new york dental schools. When that search was done after Universal Search first rolled out, the results looked like this:

As you can see, they were positioned at the top of the page. Immediately after Universal Search, they might still appear at the top of the page, but they also sometimes go blended further down, like this:

Notice how the local search box is in the middle of the page? That’s because, at the time, Google decided that after looking at all the various vertical and web search results, local results were fourth in overall relevancy.

In addition, if you could see the entire page, you’d notice that there are 10 listings in all. The first three are above the local listings, then the A, B, & C listings next to the local box counted as results 4 through 6. After the box, there were four more listings — 10 in all. The local listings caused three of the web search listings to get removed.

Here’s how it looks today:

Super-Size My Blended Results

Notice how there are 10 local listings at the top (a recent change from the three local listings that used to be shown), followed by 10 web search listings after that. That’s 20 listings in all. In “traditional” Universal Search, there should only be 10. But traditional is gone. Google now will super-size the results and go beyond 10, if it feels that’s appropriate. Said David Bailey, tech lead for Google, on Universal Search:

We’ve found there are times when an individual result from one of our verticals simply belongs amongst the main list of results, with little fuss made about how it’s different. Other times, what’s important is that there’s a bunch of relevant content from that vertical, and in those cases we think of it as a search refinement option that’s enhanced with a results preview, and so it’s shown in addition to the main list rather than displacing results from it.

It’s not just local results that may get added to the results page, without taking away web search results. Other vertical search results get added as well, as will be seen further below.

Blended Means Top, Bottom & In Between!

Did you notice the local search results are back at the top of the page, just like they often appeared before Universal Search rolled out? Seeing it there, you might wonder what happened to all that “blending” that supposedly was going on.

Johanna Wright, who heads up Google’s search user interface group, says that removing a web search result and blending a vertical listing into the top 10 list will still happen. But she also stressed that blending also means putting vertical content on the page in addition to the list, perhaps at the top and bottom, especially if users will react to certain types of content better there:

If we think we need to call something out, we say “Hey, look at news, images, books” [by inserted at the top or bottom]. If we think ranking makes more sense, then we don’t do the call out [and results are blended].

With local search, a display at the top of the web search results is most common. However, sometimes a local search unit will be interleaved into the top 10 web listings, taking the place of one of them.

More Examples: Image Search Blending

Let’s see some more examples of Universal Search in action. Here’s a search for subway pictures:

As you can see, Universal Search is putting the images at the top of the page. On rare occasions, I’ve seen image search results come at the bottom. But top display pretty much seems standard. In addition, image search always seems to be additive — i.e., you get image search results, plus 10 other results — 11 listings, in all (or 13 listings, if you count each image shown as a separate listing).

News Search Blending

How about news? Like image search, you’ll often see it at the top, as with this search for interest rates:

As with image search, the news box is additive — you get it in addition to 10 other listings. But the placement isn’t always the same. Consider a search for stock crash:

Here, the news box comes in position four. But despite the blending, the box remains additive. Count all the unpaid listings, including the news box, and you’ll see there are 11 in all. In “old” universal search, there would have been only 10.

Book Search Blending

Book Search blending is difficult for me to show, because it simply doesn’t seem to be working consistently. Consider these searches that I thought would have brought up some Google Book Search content:

• he does not number the streaks of the tulip
• i know that i shall meet my fate somewhere in the clouds above
• her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer
• Othello
• The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
• quiver river state park

The last one DID bring up Google Book Search results when I last looked at Universal Search, and the others are all places I’d have expected it to kick in. Google’s chalked it up to data center issues, though Search Engine Land contributing editor Greg Sterling had problems seeing Google Book Search blending in California just as I did when I was searching from the UK.

Google says that book search results will sometimes be blended by taking away a web search listing, such as with how to draw birds or kinakuta palawan borneo. Other times, a special book search box makes more sense to appear at the top of results (as with toni morrison) or at the bottom (as with differential equations).

Video Search: Fully Blended

Half-a-year on, it is video search results that are the most “blended” in terms of being mixed among web search results in the top ten list. Consider this search for diet coke and mentos:

Everywhere you see a thumbnail image, that’s a video result pulled from Google Video. In addition, these results are subtractive. For any video listing coming from Google Video, a web search result is pulled and replaced. Count them up, and you’ll see there are 10 results in all.

As with the launch of Google Universal Search, you can play video right within the search results, if that video is hosted by Google-owned YouTube or Google Video. You just click on the + symbol next to the words “Watch video” to open up the player:

Video not hosted by Google still cannot be played inline. Why not? Said Google:

We’re still streaming only Google Video and YouTube content because that remains the best way for us to ensure a certain quality of experience for users.

Also, back when Google Universal Search launched, we covered then and in follow-ups like Google Video Morphs Further Into New Video Meta Search Role how Google Video was listing video content from across the web, rather than just from Google. Since then, Google Video now encompasses hundreds of sources for video content, Google said.

Product Search: Top & Bottom

Product search is one of the two new additions to Universal Search. Product search unites may appear at the top of the page like this for toshiba m500:

Alternatively, if not deemed as relevant as other listings but still important, they may come at the bottom like this for tomtom 720:

Blog Search At The Bottom

Blog search is the other new addition to Universal Search. Google says that right now, blog search will always appear at the bottom of the page, like this for stock market:

Blog & Being Fresh In General

Results in the Blog Search box come from Google Blog Search, which can pull content from a submitted feed in within seconds, if you’ve pinged the service. That means when the box appears on the Google search results page through Universal Search, Google can seem very fresh.

Of course, even without the box, Google has gotten fresher. Certain blog home pages are regularly crawled independently of Google Blog Search, just as there are news sources and even ordinary web sites that are subject to rapid crawling and insertion into the index.

Many SEOs will know Google has various crawlers using names corresponding to services like news or blog search, as well as Googlebot for the general crawl. But actually, all these crawlers are part of the same centralized system. They may report different names, but the content all generally flows back into Google’s index to be sliced and diced as appropriate.

The centralized system will hit news sites frequently, because that’s what you need to do to keep news content fresh. Blog search continues to take in only whatever is put out in a feed, so that it doesn’t have complete information for sites that use partial feeds. Pages like this only get updated when a regular crawl happens.

That regular crawl, however, can be faster for sites that Google has either algorithmically or with human review decided should be part of its “instant layer.” These are sites where pages are fully crawled within hours or less of posting. For example, here’s a page we wrote about on the Google Oogle Sari that is showing up only a few hours after being posted:

You can see in the description that it was found six hours ago, at the time I did the search — and it was probably showing up well before that.

Minty Fresh Indexing from Matt Cutts and Finding fresh results from the Official Google Blog talked in the middle of last year about the freshness change. Some seeing this have mistakenly assumed that the entire Google index is refreshed within minutes. It’s not — they’re fast, but not refresh tens-of-billions of documents in minutes fast!

Blended Weirdness

So far, I’ve shown examples of one type of vertical result being blended. More than that can flow in. Consider this search for newport beach pictures:

In it, you can see how image search comes first, followed by local results, followed by 10 web search results. That’s three types of content blended, with 12 to 16 listing in all, depending on if you count each image and each local search result as a separate listing.

Now consider this search for tom sawyer:

In position three, you’ll see a blended video result. Then at the bottom, there are news archive results. Google News Archive search is NOT part of Google News Search and is NOT part of the Universal Search blending system. So, what’s it doing there? And what about things like this, where for gwen stefani discography, a Google Music unit appears:

Where Have All The OneBoxes Gone?

In the past, I would have called the examples above of Google Music Search and Google News Archives “OneBoxes” and pointed to this reference in the Google home page to explain them more:

H. OneBox results Google’s search technology finds many sources of specialized information. Those that are most relevant to your search are included at the top of your search results. Typical OneBox results include news, stock quotes, weather and local websites related to your search.

However, that explanation of what OneBoxes are was last seen in May, before Universal Search rolled out. Today, it’s been replaced with this:

H. Integrated results Google’s search technology searches across all types of content and ranks the results that are most relevant to your search. Your results may be from multiple content types, including images, news, books, maps, and videos.

So, are OneBoxes gone? Are these things part of Universal Search too?

No, they’re not. Again, Universal Search only pulls content from these sources and decides if, when, and how to blend into the page:

1. Web Search
2. Book Search
3. Images
4. Local/Maps
5. News
6. Video
7. Blog Search
8. Product Search

Beyond these, Google has other vertical search engines and special features such as flight tracking, weather conditions, and more. These continue to be placed on the page according to decisions made by other search algorithms.

Who Cares How It’s Blended?

Does it matter? To the searcher, probably not. Said Wright:

From my perspective, I think of this all as universal search, where we try to get the best stuff on the page. We look at all the backends, deciding how to blend and where to order it.

In general, I agree with Wright. Universal Search is a good term to apply to the entire concept that Google is blending a lot of different information into a single search results page. And as long as the searcher gets a page that seems relevant, they don’t care how it is done.

But for the hard-core searcher and search marketer, it’s has been helpful to know what’s been coming off Universal Search when it was in a more “subtractive mode” in the past — when it would take away web search results and replace them with vertical listings.

Now that this has largely changed, the main reason to still know if it is Universal Search actually in action is that Google itself made a fairly big deal on how smart Universal Search is in terms of comparative ranking.

Before Universal Search and the blended search / Search 3.0 era, search engines were already blending vertical results and shortcuts above regular listings or in other places on the page. Google said Universal Search was going a step beyond and making comparative relevancy decision across multiple data sources. But competitors pushed back that Universal Search wasn’t so smart. To understand, consider what I wrote about video blending at Google, which is most noticeable because of the thumbnails:

It’s also something that has Google competitors upset. They show video content that’s listed on web pages in their regular search results. Adding thumbnails and enhancing these “web” listings wouldn’t be difficult. So they don’t see what Google is doing as that unique. Yahoo says ‘Been there, done that’ to Google redesign from News.com gets into this more.

For its part, Google has explained that it is not simply flagging video on web pages for enhancement. It stresses that it is searching against an entirely different video database to decide of the results there are of greater relevance than a web page listing. If so, the web page listing gets yanked. That is more sophisticated — yet the end results might not be that different than just inserting thumbnails for web pages that you can tell also have video.

Who Cares How It’s Blended?

Even though web search results are no longer being yanked or removed as much as in the past, Google stresses that Universal Search is still indeed smart and in action guiding all types of blending. It also stressed that the exact nature of blending is likely to continue evolving. Some of this is even already seen in tests that were spotted late last year, where vertical results were showing up in a right column, similar to how Google’s test bed SearchMash operates, not to mention the Ask3D display that Ask moved to last year. Said Wright of the changes and evolutions:

The top ten list may not support all of them [vertical search results that Google wants to display]. We’re ready to bust through with more types of content, and the current user interface might need to change to support them. We’re experimenting with right-hand side placement as you noted, as well as other ideas coming down the pike. While we don’t know exactly how it will evolve, we’re quite sure that there will remain a strong ranking component to the choice and layout of groups on the page, especially as we continue to increase coverage for many of the verticals.

Search 1.0: Location, Frequency, & On-The-Page Ranking Criteria

Let’s go back to the good old days, around 1996, when some of the big names in web search were Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, WebCrawler, Open Text, Hotbot, and AltaVista. Yahoo was there, too — but it was the exception, the search engine that relied on humans to catalog the web, rather than the others that used "crawlers" to automatically build listings.

Those crawlers were robots that automatically followed links across the web. When they came to a new page, they would effectively make a copy of it. All the copies were stored in an "index," which was like a big book of all the pages they had collected. The crawlers indexed millions of pages, which sounds like nothing compared to the billions of pages that are harvested today. But back then, the web was a lot smaller!

When someone did a search, the actual namesake "search engine" component kicked in, using an "algorithm" to sort through all the pages in the index. The algorithm was a system designed to return what a programmer thought the best pages would be. Back then, the best pages were deemed to be those that used the search words a lot in proportion to other words on the page, plus whether those words appeared in key areas of a web page.

Consider a search for shoes. The algorithm might not like this page:

Walking Alone At Night

Walking alone
I hear behind me
Footsteps
Shoes softly scuffle
Friend or foe?
Keys, and I’m safe inside

Maybe the algorithm doesn’t like bad poetry written in a hurry. But see how the word "shoes" appears only once? How relevant is this page really, then, if shoes only gets a single mention. Now consider:

Buying Shoes Online

As the web grows, many are discovering
that shopping can indeed be done online
for all types of things, even shoes!

Yes, footwear fanatics. You can buy
shoes online. But what about trying
them on? Those selling shoes have
thought of that. In this review, we
look at online shoe sellers with great
return policies.

In the second example, shoes is mentioned several times. Plus, it appears as the headline of the story, and in the opening paragraph. Let’s say it also appears in the HTML title tag. That means shoes not only appears with frequency, but it also appears in key locations on the page. Algorithms back then liked that.

So first generation search? Search 1.0 was largely about looking at the location and frequency of words on individual web pages to measure them against each other.

Search 2.0: Looking At Links & Other Off-The-Page Criteria

It didn’t take long for savvy search marketers to figure out that if the algorithm liked certain things, you should tailor content to suit. Thus, SEO was born — search engine optimization, optimizing content for search engines. Some SEOs focused on making relatively minor changes that still could have dramatic impacts. Other figured if location/frequency was what the search engines wanted, the more the better:

Shoes, Beautiful Shoes!

Shoes are the best shoes
anyone could hope to find
shoes online at our store
with shoes shoes shoes
blue shoes red shoes
walking shoes tennis shoes

Pretty ugly — but that’s OK — this text might be hidden from human view in a variety of ways. The main point is that location and frequency worked better in the trusted environments of libraries and controlled collections of documents that web search grew out. Applied to the open web, where anyone could get anything listed, it started to fall apart. Back in 1999, AltaVista founder Louis Monier told me:

The good answer to the query ‘car’ has nothing to do with the text. I’d rather use a medium with a crystal ball.

Instead of a crystal ball, two guys by the name of Larry Page and Sergey Brin had fired up their own search engine, Google, that relied on link analysis to rank pages. They weren’t the first to look at links, and PageRank was only part of the overall algorithm. But the pair popularized a shift for all the major search engines to make a second generation leap — depending on criteria not actually on web pages to rank which pages are best. Call it Search 2.0.

It’s not just links that can be part of off-the-page criteria. Clickthrough is a metric that has been and may still be used, where you determine if people are clicking on a particular listing more often than one in a particular position normally gets. If so, perhaps the listing should be ranking better. Domain age and general traffic levels to a site are other things that can be used. But it’s really the links that remain dominant.

Google in particular popularized the notion of links as votes, with the web being "democratic" in how those votes were cast. And for a time, it worked. But then we got active campaigns to win votes, Googlebombing that led to things like the miserable failure ranking for President George W. Bush. We also saw an economy of buying and selling votes spring up, which to this day sees Google trying to fight off paid links.

Search 2.0 still works, of course, despite these problems. But things could be better — cue Search 3.0 to the stage, please.

Intermission: What The Hell Is Vertical Search?

I’ve long hated the term "vertical" search, which was popularized by financial analysts more than search engines. I hate it because most people have no idea what it means. I know. I ask audiences all the time if they understand the term, and plenty of hands of those indicating "no" go up, followed by "ah ha" looks after I explain it.

But vertical search as a term is here to stay, continuing to be used and even having its own Wikipedia entry, so let me explain it.

Go to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Ask.com and do a default search. What you’ve done is a "horizontal" search. You’ve searched across the entire spectrum of the web for a topic. To illustrate, consider just some of the topics that pages are about:

… shopping video news sports weather research stocks lottery …

See, a nice long horizontal line. But if there’s some news event that happens, you don’t want to search the entire web for information. Doing that means you’re hunting through billions of pages to find the relatively few updated with the fresh and relevant information. Far better if you focus only on news content.

To help you do that, search engines build specialized search engines that only go to news sites. Rather than search across the horizontal spectrum of the web, they let you slice down "vertically" only into news — or into sports — or whatever. Search for "fires" in a news search engine after a major fire in a particular area, and pages about that fire will dominate the results, since you can apply a time-based ranking criteria. Search for "windows" in a home improvement search engine, and you shouldn’t get information about how to fix Windows Vista.

Vertical search isn’t new. However, it faces a huge challenge. Searchers simply don’t know vertical search engines exist. Put tabs, buttons, drop-downs, you name it — it’s been tried (see Why Search Sucks & You Won’t Fix It The Way You Think for some illustrations). Users have ignored these options.

Here’s another problem. Consider this:

That’s my "Google 2005" image that I made in 2001, for a keynote to a librarians’ group on search trends. My slide was to illustrate that Google couldn’t keep adding tabs for each vertical search engine it unleashed. More important, even if it did, no one clicked on the tabs. Instead, I explained that search engine would need to learn to push the right tabs for us, behind the scenes, something I eventually called "invisible tabs."

Search 3.0: Blending Vertical Search Results

Even in 2001, we had some of this mixing of vertical results happening, usually at the top of pages in what Google called OneBoxes and others gave different names. But finally this year, search’s third generation really happened. The supremacy of "horizontal" web search results being the default was hit by Google’s Universal Search rollout.

Our Google 2.0: Google Universal Search article from May explains more about the inner workings of Universal Search — and the headline might now seem odd — shouldn’t it be Google 3.0 if we’re talking Search 3.0? Well, Google 1.0 was a Search 2.0 search engine already! That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

The short story is that Universal Search replaces some of the web search results with listings that come from vertical sources, such as video, local, or news. The results are mixed in, blended as appropriate, as our Search Illustrated column, um, illustrated in July:

It’s not just Google, however. In June, Ask launched its Ask 3D interface that used the "Morph" algorithm to automatically decide which vertical search results to blend into the main page. Yes, web search listings still remain front and center, with vertical search blended around web search — but vertical results became far more prominent.

In September, Microsoft relaunched with Search 3.0 features and in October, Yahoo finally announced Search 3.0 material it had been rolling out.

OK, I am stretching the last two a bit. In both cases, they’ve mainly enlarged the "shortcut" style material that shows up at the top of a search for some queries, such as illustrated below for Yahoo:

And here for Live:

Still, the vertical search listings are growing in how often they appear at Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as with the amount of space they take up on the search page. It’s enough for me to declare Search 3.0 now fully engaged by all the major search engines.

For search marketers, Search 3.0 represents new opportunities. There’s less content in various vertical search engines, so the odds of ranking well naturally increase more. In addition, much of the content in vertical search areas such as local and video seems poorly optimized. With just a little care, people should be able to see improvements — and now improvements that may bring them to the first page of the "regular" search results.

Want to learn more from a search marketing perspective? Aside from how we cover verticals (and thus Search 3.0) through our columns here and features, as I said above, we’re going to have an entire track on Search 3.0 at our SMX West show happening next February, specifically these sessions:

• Search 3.0: The Blended Search Revolution
   
• Search 3.0: Video, Images & Blended Results
   
• Search 3.0: Local Search & Blended Results
   
• Search 3.0: Online Retail & Blended Results

Search 4.0 & Beyond

I’m certainly not the first to use the phrase "Search 3.0," and I know not everyone agree with how I suggest it be used now. Time will tell! But I hope this article explains why I find it useful to explain the latest generation that’s been unleashed, especially in a world where everything seems more easily understood by some if it’s X.0 something.

I’d note that back in October 2005, Robert Scoble wished for a "Search 3.0" world where search engines learned from users, and Read/Write Web wrote in July about "Search 2.0" companies that were using "third generation" social features. That got me to comment:

The third gen has commonly been considered the combination of personal data – either refining results because of your own past history or that of others. Lump it all into social search, and that’s your third gen. And since it’s third gen, please call it Search 3.0 if you must and don’t force it into a Web 2.0 world just to try and mesh some Web 2.0 companies into a Search 2.0 framework.

But the human / social element does have a role to play in search. It’s the other long expected evolution to hit, one that I’ve long written about being alongside vertical search as a third generational leap:

Vertical search is important because it’s one of the two major things I’ve long talked about as being how search will advance. First generation search analyzed words on a page to rank content. Second generation search tapped into link analysis. Third generation search to me is looking at both user input (what we visit; what we click on; personalized results) and making search go more vertical.

So where’s the humanity in Search 3.0? It’s not — I’m shoving it into Search 4.0, a fourth generation leap that Google’s already making and the other major search engines have yet to push into.

Search 4.0 is another track at the show — and the topic for another article next week (Now posted: see Search 4.0: Putting Humans Back In Search). Next time, more on personalized and social search. Until then, here’s some key reading for those who want to look ahead:

• Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
   
• Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results
   
• The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social Graph With Search Engines