Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The development of blended search is an exciting new chapter in the history of search engine technology. Not only have search engines developed wonderfully intelligent means for sorting out spammers from authentic content, they are beginning to include images, videos, book results, recordings, and more in a multi-media search result environment. According to Google Senior Staff Engineer, David Bailey, the process for creating a blended search is similar to the previous web results model. The only real difference being that each form of content is classified into a particular “silo” of information that the search engine investigates. Results are first collected from all “silos,” or content categories, and then the engine creates a ranking decision based on the collective results. Of course, this ranking system is more complicated since comparing a video to a website, or a picture to a song, is quite difficult, not to mention collecting all of this data. David Bailey acknowledges this complication in terms of cost and accuracy, but continues to have a hopeful perspective toward the future of blended search and its ability to truly meet the needs of searchers.

So what does this mean for those interested in increasing their search engine visibility and rankings? I agree with Bailey, recommending that those pursuing search engine optimization should begin tampering with various forms of content. Marketers and optimizers should start publishing high quality and well captioned images, creating video and video sitemaps, updating business listings for local searches, submitting feeds to product searches, and creating high quality multi-media blogs. One must only consider the developments of the web’s most popular social media networks to realize how important these things are becoming. For example, StumbleUpon and Digg, two of the most popular bookmarking communities, have both introduced new submission and search possibilities that specifically focus on video and images.

Because blended search is so new, most of the space is open for the taking. Any relevant videos or images of minimal quality are likely to find their way into search results, especially when hosted on major posting sites such as Youtube, MetaCafe, and Flickr. So for the cost, videos and images can be excellent exposure tools. The studies are still young in regards to tracking actual conversions from videos and images, but an increase in website traffic never hurts. Now is the time to take advantage and explore blended search. Like the development of traditional search rankings, those who get start early are more likely to solidify a highly ranked presence.

About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in Internet marketing and search engine optimization is largely focused on the social media and multi-media facets of exposure. To learn more about search engine optimization, visit www.arteworks.biz.