Google Maps & YouTube Are Big Traffic Winners in Google Universal Update

Bill Tancer of Hitwise released new data comparing Google’s web properties before and after the release of Google Universal Search. As we know, Google Universal Search changed how Google’s vertical search results appeared in the main Google web search results.

Overall, Google Maps and YouTube saw the biggest increase, while book search and image search took the biggest dive in traffic.

Google Maps saw a 20% increase in traffic because prior to Universal search, Google only displayed map results for a very limited set of queries. Now, Google Maps results are far more common and take up to three of the seven web search results.

YouTube realized an 8.26% increase in traffic since the launch of Universal search. Prior, YouTube videos were not shown in Google’s web search results.

Image search took a 7.22% dive, most likely because the image one box results were no longer guaranteed to be displayed at the top. Image search results now can be found at the bottom, middle or top of the results.

More statistics on Google’s web properties before and after the Universal launch can be found at Hitwise.

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Barry Schwartz

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 can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.